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.
Separately, Dutch authorities were investigating a strikingly similar incident in which a Boeing 747-400 freighter dropped engine parts shortly after takeoff from Maastricht airport on Saturday, Reuters said. An airport spokesman said small metal parts were scattered across the southern city of Meerssen. There was some damage and a woman was injured. It landed safely.
The plane in the US, with 231 passengers and 10 crew members on board, also landed safely. No one on board or on the ground was reported injured, authorities said.
Federal Aviation Administration administrator Steve Dickson said in a statement Sunday that based on an initial assessment of safety data, inspectors “ concluded that the inspection interval should be stepped up for the hollow fan blades unique to this engine model, which is only available at Boeing. is used. 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.
Boeing said it recommends that “operations of the 69 in-service and 59 in-storage 777s” with the Pratt & Whitney engines be suspended worldwide “until the FAA establishes the proper inspection protocol.”
Pratt & Whitney released a statement saying it “has sent a team to work with investigators” and “is actively working with operators and regulators to support the revised inspection interval” of the affected engines.
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.
Korean Air said Monday it grounded its 16777s with the Pratt & Whitney engines.
Boeing said it supports “the decision … of the Japanese Civil Aviation Agency” and “the action of the FAA” to suspend operations of the 777s with Pratt & Whitney engines.
“We are working with these regulators as they take action while these planes are aground and further inspections are conducted by Pratt & Whitney,” added Boeing.
In the Netherlands, Reuters quoted the airport spokesperson as saying that photos seemed to show that the parts that fell to the ground were parts of an engine blade, but that was investigated.
Witnesses said they saw one engine on fire. The plane landed safely at Liège Airport in Belgium, some 30 kilometers south of Maastricht.
The cargo plane had a Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine, a smaller version of one of the United Airlines 777 in Denver, the Dutch authorities said.