Flight 438 · Boeing 737-300
Boeing 737-300 · Incident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Dallas Love Field (DAL) to Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field (LIT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG08IA002
- 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
Boeing 737-300
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- 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
- N676SW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dallas Love Field (DAL), Dallas, TXTo Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field (LIT), Little Rock, AR
- 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 · climb to 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
- 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 › Fractured
- Compressor assembly › Separation
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 experienced a failure of the No. 2 engine while climbing through flight level (FL) 250 to FL 330. The flight crew reported feeling severe vibration, pulled both throttles back to idle, declared an emergency, made an air turn back and performed an uneventful single-engine landing. Examination of the engine revealed that all the fan blades exhibited heavy airfoil damage, with several fractured near the platform. The forward and rear spinner cones were no longer attached to the fan disk and a large penetration hole was noted on the right-hand side of the fan cowl, just forward of the engine fan case. Examination of the airplane revealed impact marks along the right side of the fuselage and the right-hand horizontal stabilizer. None of the fuselage impacts were through to the cabin. The pieces of the forward and rear spinners cones that exited the engine were never recovered. Metallurgical examination of the fracture surfaces of the fan blades and the fragments of the rear spinner aft flange revealed no preexisting fatigue-type mechanism and all the fractures were consistent with overstress. Four sequential fan blade spacers were distorted consistent with a severe axial load rearward applied to the spacers by the rear spinner cone prior to the spinner cone release; however, no determination could be made as to the initial failure or what may have impacted the spinner cone.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to the No. 2 engine experiencing a release of its fan spinner through the fan cowl as a result of an unidentified object striking the spinner, separating it from the fan disk and causing the spinner to be ingested into the fan blades.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG08IA002
- Event ID
- 20071231X02010
- Case number
- ENG08IA002
- 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: ceafdd26b9a74ba897017117cadb45e2d5d45314f4762ed2dabb0a8107e4d18a; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:40:20.334Z.