Royal Airlines Flight 311
Boeing 727-212 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during takeoff
From Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL) to Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA98FA112
- 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
- Accident
- 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 727-212
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 727
- 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
- CFRYS
- Operator
- Royal Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL)To Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ), Toronto
- 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 129: Foreign
- 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 · roll/run
- 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
- Total 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
- Compressor assembly, wheel retention › Fatigue
- Manufacturer › Inadequate quality control
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On takeoff roll, between 90 and 100 knots, the No. 2 engine sustained an uncontained failure. The flight crew aborted the takeoff and when informed that smoke was emanating from No. 2 engine, the crew brought the airplane to a stop on a taxiway, and the pilot commanded a passenger emergency evacuation. Examination of the engine revealed that one of 12 low pressure compressor (LPC) rear tiebolts fractured at its 4th stage disk land and was separated into the plenum ahead of the LPC. The separated tierod impacted the other 11 tierods until they eventually fractured, causing catastrophic separation of the LPC assembly between the 3rd and 4th stage rotors. Metallurgical examination of the failed tierods revealed the first tierod failed due to fatigue and the other 11 due to stress. It was further revealed that an anti-gallant treatment to the tierods that are used to bolt the 3rd through 6th compressor disks together as a unit was not present. The treatment is applied to the lands of the tierods at manufacture as specified in Pratt & Whitney Service Bulletin No. 5407.
Probable cause
Failure of the No.2 engine low pressure compressor rear tierod. Also contributing to the accident was failure of the manufacturer to apply an antigallant treatment to the tierod's compressor disk lands during manufacture.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA98FA112
- Event ID
- 20001211X09733
- Case number
- MIA98FA112
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1998-03-31.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 250ba99942e9809416abe28a391df710459d40fe5ced1772db1d98a3071077cb; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:11:26.252Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for CFRYS; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.