Evergreen Int'L Airlines Boeing 747-273C incident
Boeing 747-273C · Incident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96IA199
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 747-273C
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N470EV
- Operator
- Evergreen Int'L Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)To Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL), Honolulu, HI
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 121: Air Carrier
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · climb to cruise
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, inspection, inadequate
- Wing, skin › Debonded
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Los Angeles, CA, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The crew felt a rumble as the aircraft was accelerating in the climb-to-cruise segment, and subsequently found that the right wing inboard wing panel had been partially torn away. The captain elected to return to the airport where a landing was made with the inboard flaps, which showed secondary damage, retracted. An inspection showed trailing edge portions of the composite right inboard wing panel had separated and damaged the fore and mid right inboard flaps. Maintenance records revealed that cracking was detected in the forward outboard corner during the last C check. The crack was repaired, inspected, and repainted. The previous C check also found disbonding and delamination in the right wing panel. Boeing has received a total of 245 operator reports involving disbonding of this panel, which has separated from the aircraft in flight in 95 instances. The wing flaps are susceptible to secondary damage as a result of the panel separations. A service bulletin with five revisions has been issued. Operators have been directed to replace the coin tap sound inspection with an ultrasound inspection of the panels to improve the detection likelihood of a disbonding that has occurred below the panel surface. Prior to this incident, the operator chose to retain the coin tap sound inspection method rather than adopt the ultrasonic inspection.
Probable cause
the operator's failure to adopt a manufacturer's stipulated ultrasonic inspection procedure, which led to the in-flight separation of the wing panel.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96IA199
- Event ID
- 20001208X05804
- Case number
- LAX96IA199
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c0cd2a2608b8369db98065ef4dec2d616b8b6e4011d5f2cf33bd76c04cdbe445; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:50:58.320Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N470EV; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.