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Flight 3294 · British Aerospace JETSTREAM 3101 JETSTREAM

27 Aug 1999 · South Bend, IN, United States

British Aerospace JETSTREAM 3101 JETSTREAM · Incident: loss of engine power en route

From Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW) to Gerald R. Ford International Airport (GRR)

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Event

NTSB case
CHI99IA350
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

British Aerospace JETSTREAM 3101 JETSTREAM

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
N460CE
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW), Chicago, ILTo Gerald R. Ford International Airport (GRR), Grand Rapids, MI
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 · 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
Loss of engine power
DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
None

Cause areas

  • Accessory drive assembly, drive gear › Failure

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The airplane sustained an in-flight failure of the right engine. The captain performed the checklist to shut down the engine and performed the single engine landing. No injuries were reported. A review of the engine history revealed that this was the third "in-flight shutdown" for this engine. The engine's time since new was 21,101.8 hours, its time since overhaul was 2,414.3 hour, and its time installed on the airplane since its last maintenance was 76.4 hours. The reason for the last maintenance was an "in-flight shutdown." The accessory section was examined at the NTSB Materials Laboratory. The report stated that the spur gear appeared undamaged. The spur gearshaft had portions of teeth missing. The housing had markings and impressions consistent with splined spur gear contact. The splined spur gear was found fractured and deformed into an oval shape, resulting in a gap between the mating fracture faces. The outer surfaces parallel to the circumferential plane of the splined spur gear appeared rubbed, and portions had a blue-purple tint consistent with frictional heating. Areas of the fracture surfaces also had a similar blue-purple tint. Portions of five external gear teeth were missing. All of the internal spline's teeth peaks were missing and the teeth were deformed. One radial fracture face had smooth flat features, consistent with fatigue and crack arrest lines were found. The fatigue had multiple origins. Inner diameter origins were located in the root of a spline. The contact surface of the spline tooth adjacent to the fracture origin was deformed consistent with rotational contact with spline crowns. Hardness of the splined spur gear was measured to be 38 HRC, which was within its specified range.

Probable cause

the right engine accessory section's splined gear spur gear failure during cruise flight.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record CHI99IA350
Event ID
20001212X19431
Case number
CHI99IA350
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, damage. 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: 059fb5a8b1d6f5dca89c87d711ea7a6f9f724d022da672bb73aca2669b51f12f; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:53:39.000Z.