ENG06IA018 · Boeing 767-223(ER)
American Airlines Boeing 767-223(ER) · Incident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) while standing
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG06IA018
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Unknown
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Not recorded
Boeing 767-223(ER)
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 767
- 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
- N330AA
- Operator
- American Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Standing
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Manufacturer › Acft/equip, inadequate design
- Turbine assembly, turbine wheel › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The Boeing 767 was undergoing a high-power test of the left-hand General Electric (GE) CF6-80C2 engine to troubleshoot a pilot's report of the engine being unable to make climb thrust. During the test, the engine experienced an uncontained failure of the high pressure turbine (HPT) stage 1 disk. Examination of the pieces of the disk revealed the disk failed from an intergranular fatigue crack that originated from a small depression on the blade slot bottom aft corner radius. There were two other intergranular fatigue cracks that originated from small depressions on other blade slot bottom aft corner radii. Intergranular fatigue cracks are typically associated with very high stresses that exceed the material's capability. GE issued service bulletins (SB) to require inspections of CF6-80A and -80C2 HPT stage 1 disks that the FAA mandated with airworthiness directives (AD), but the SBs and AD did not establish a compliance schedule. When the SBs and AD was revised to establish a compliance schedule, the schedule was such that disks with much higher cycles since new, than those that had previously failed or were found cracked, were permitted to remain in service. On August 26, 2006, the Safety Board issued safety recommendation A-06-60 through A-06-64, which addressed these deficiencies. The recommendations can be found at the following url address: http://www.ntsb.gov/recs/letters/2006/A06_60_64.pdf.
Probable cause
The HPT stage 1 disk failed from an intergranular fatigue crack because of GE's inadequate design of the CF6-80 series HPT stage 1 disk. The inadequate design of the disk resulted in a high stress area in the blade slot bottom aft corner that was at or nearly at the material's capability so that there was no damage tolerance such that a small dent could cause a crack to initiate and propagate to failure. Contributing to the disk's failure was the FAA's failure to mandate an accelerated inspection schedule after a previous CF6-80A uncontained HPT stage 1 disk failure had occurred and after other CF6-80A HPT disks had been found during routine overhaul to have cracks in the blade slot bottom aft corners.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG06IA018
- Event ID
- 20060809X01126
- Case number
- ENG06IA018
- 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: 8c9cc29dffc6667b9b0ba7f57227323801a12e45f4b49f1f98f5e3ac70f556b3; retrieved 2026-09-18T21:15:05.095Z.