Federal aviation regulators recommend United Airlines to conduct inspections of all Boeing 777s equipped with the engine type suffered a catastrophic failure above Denver on Saturday. United said it is taking those planes out of service temporarily.
The announcements came a day after United Airlines Flight 328 crash-landed at Denver International Airport after the right engine blown apart shortly after takeoff. Pieces of the engine’s casing, a Pratt & Whitney PW4000, rained down on suburbs.
The plane with 231 passengers and 10 crew on board landed safely and no one on board or on the ground was injured, authorities said.
Federal Aviation Administration administrator Steve Dickson said in a statement on Sunday that based on an initial review of safety data, inspectors “ concluded that the inspection interval should be increased for the hollow fan blades unique to this engine model, which is used exclusively on Boeing 777 aircraft. “
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The National Transportation Safety Board said in a separate statement that two of the engine’s fan blades were broken and the rest of the fan blades “showed damage.” The NTSB did warn that it was too early to draw conclusions about how the incident happened.
Video posted on Twitter showed that the engine went up completely in flames as the plane flew through the sky. Freeze frames from several videos taken by a passenger slightly in front of the bike and posted to Twitter appeared to show a broken fan blade in the engine.
United is the only US carrier with the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 in its fleet, the FAA said. United said it currently employs 24 of the 777s.
United said it will work closely with the FAA and the NTSB “to determine any additional steps needed to ensure that these aircraft meet our rigorous safety standards and can be returned to service.”
The NTSB said the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder have been transported to the Washington lab to download and analyze the data. NTSB investigations can take a year or more, although in most cases the agency releases investigation materials halfway through the process.
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Airlines in Japan and South Korea also have Pratt & Whitney engine planes. According to Nikkei, Japan Airways and All Nippon Airways have decided to stop operating 32 planes with that engine.
Nikkei reported that Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism had also taken the planes out of service, and the ministry said an engine in the same PW4000 family had unspecified problems on a JAL 777 flying to Haneda from Naha on December 4. . stricter inspections in response.