Flight 1210 · Boeing 737-200
Boeing 737-200 · Incident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during takeoff
From Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD) to Philadelphia International Airport (PHL)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI97IA117
- 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 737-200
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- 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
- N9063U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)To Philadelphia International Airport (PHL), Philadelphia, PA
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Partial loss of engine power (mechanical 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, rebuild/remanufacture, improper
- Compressor assembly, rotor disc › Brittle fracture
- Miscellaneous, engine uncontained failure
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Chicago, IL, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The airplane experienced an uncontained failure of the 10th stage compressor disk in the right engine. The flight crew aborted the takeoff, and an emergency evacuation was conducted after an engine fire was reported to the flight crew. Metallurgical inspection of the disk revealed that it had received insufficient nickel plating when it was reworked at the operator's facility 38 flight hours and 33 cycles prior to the incident. This resulted in cadmium embrittlement of the steel. The investigation revealed the operator had no written procedures to outline the process parameters and rectifier set-ups to be used during the NiCad plating process. NiCad plating line personnel also did not have any means of checking the thickness of the nickel plating during the plating process.
Probable cause
inadequate nickel plating was applied to the compressor disk during the rework process at the operator's overhaul facility, which resulted in a brittle fracture in the disk and an uncontained engine failure. A factor was the operator's lack of written procedures and guidance for personnel on the NiCad plating line, along with their failure to supply a method of measuring the thickness of nickel applied.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI97IA117
- Event ID
- 20001208X07675
- Case number
- CHI97IA117
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- 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: d7d0064d06ad169a019ea914b762633d7e081e5e80232187afc62da2c0d9ed1e; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:36:29.366Z.