DEN08IA022 · Douglas DC-8-73F
Douglas DC-8-73F · Incident en route
From Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport (SDF) to Ontario International Airport (ONT)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN08IA022
- 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
- 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
Douglas DC-8-73F
- Aircraft type
- Douglas DC-8
- 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
- N880UP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport (SDF), Louisville, KYTo Ontario International Airport (ONT), Ontario, CA
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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
- Miscellaneous eqpt/furnishings, lavatories › Seized
- Miscellaneous eqpt/furnishings, lavatories › Smoke
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was in cruise flight when the crew detected a strange odor. When the captain opened the cockpit door, he saw smoke in the courier area. The crew donned oxygen masks, declared an emergency, and diverted to the nearest suitable airport. The crew then noticed heavy smoke coming from the lavatory and heard a motor running continuously. The captain discharged a Halon fire extinguisher into the lavatory compartment and the smoke subsided. Post-incident examination revealed the lavatory fan functioned normally, but the recirculation fan, located beneath the lavatory, had seized. The motor end ball bearing, located below the fan rotor, had failed, allowing the motor rotor to make contact with the motor stator.
Probable cause
Failure of the recirculation fan motor end ball bearing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN08IA022
- Event ID
- 20071108X01763
- Case number
- DEN08IA022
- 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, coordinates. 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: 437e61ea102ba4e2a563d4ecb34dec38abd0e41a8aac4ba64021b7a4daf1d62f; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:40:45.935Z.