LAX98IA158 · North American NA265-65
North American NA265-65 · Incident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during takeoff
From Palm Springs International Airport (PSP) to St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98IA158
- 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
- General aviation
- 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
North American NA265-65
- Aircraft type
- North American NA265
- 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
- N651MK
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Palm Springs International Airport (PSP), CATo St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL), ST LOUIS, MO
- 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 91: General Aviation
- 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
- 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
- Compressor assembly, impeller › Fatigue
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
An uncontained engine failure occurred during the takeoff roll. The high pressure centrifugal impeller disk had burst, with one chunk exiting through the engine cowling. The melt and forging records for the disk were reviewed and met the required specifications, including alloy chemistry. Metallurgical examination of the disk revealed subsurface primary and secondary fatigue cracks near an area that had been reworked to remove LCF stresses in accordance with a Service Bulletin. The cracks were located opposite of each other in the seal relief undercut area. The primary fatigue origin was below the shot-peened surface near a high stress area and the secondary fatigue origin remained subsurface, with the propagation of both cracks running parallel to the surface until overload separation. The primary fracture surface could not be definitively analyzed due to plasticity and the presence of an oxide layer. No melt, forging-related or heat-treating defects were found in the vicinity of the fatigue origins; however, subsurface LCF was present. No significant hardness difference was found either in or away from the fatigue origins. There was no evidence of a subsurface occlusion. A physical resemblance between the fatigue origin and the zones of crystallographically aligned phase (texture zones) was observed in the microstructure. The shape and orientation of the origin macrostructure and/or texture may have been a contributing factor to crack initiation; however, no precipitating event or cause for the fatigue initiation was identified. Analysis reverified the Service Bulletin rework specifications, confirming that residual stress was negligible at the depth of crack initiation.
Probable cause
the fatigue failure and uncontained separation of the high pressure impeller in the No. 2 engine during the takeoff roll. While the impeller showed evidence of a subsurface fatigue origin, the percipient cause of the separation was not definitively determined.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98IA158
- Event ID
- 20001211X10122
- Case number
- LAX98IA158
- 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: 177646bd670bf34699149f1afb36864dadcf0c79e965c26bf81aedfdeea0c9c7; retrieved 2026-09-22T17:48:26.412Z.