Air New Zealand Boeing 767-219ER incident
Boeing 767-219ER · Incident
From ABBN · Brisbane to Auckland International Airport (NZAA)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's registration. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG03WA004
- 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
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- Not recorded
Boeing 767-219ER
- 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
- Unknown Narrative disagrees
- Operator
- Air New Zealand
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From ABBN · BrisbaneTo Auckland International Airport (NZAA), Auckland
- 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
- Non-U.S., Commercial
- 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
- Not recorded
- Defining eventThe 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
- Not recorded
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Brisbane, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On December 8, 2002, Boeing 767-219ER aircraft, registered ZK-NBC, sustained a failure of the number-1 (left) engine during a scheduled regular passenger transport flight from Brisbane to Auckland. The flight crew reported a loud 'bang' and felt the aircraft move to the right, followed by a progressive yaw to the left. The crew shut down the left engine, a GE CF6-80A and completed checklist items before returning the aircraft to Brisbane. An initial engineering evaluation of the left engine revealed the loss of the outboard fan cowl section and a large rupture of the outboard core cowl, with associated damage to the engine strut and wing leading edge flap above that area. The engine core showed the complete circumferential disruption of the high-pressure turbine casing and the loss of a large segment of the first-stage high-pressure turbine disk. The low speed (N1) spool shaft had fractured between the first and second-stage turbine disks.
Failure of the number-1 (left) engine from ZK-NBC occurred as a direct result of the rupture of the first-stage high-pressure turbine disk, liberating a large disk section that was uncontained by the engine casing or nacelle. Disk fracture had initiated from prior fatigue cracking at the base of a turbine blade fir tree slot. Fatigue cracking had initiated from the rear corner of that blade slot and propagated radially inward and axially forward, before turning to intersect an adjacent rim-bolt hole. At that stage, the crack was below critical size and incapable of directly causing the disk rupture. Subsequently, the growth of a secondary radial-axial crack from the base of the primary crack enlarged the total defect to a depth of 39 mm, where it reached critical size and initiated the overload failure of the remaining section, with the release of the disk fragment.
The investigation is under the jurisdiction of the government of Australia. Further information pertaining to this accident may be obtained from:
Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) P.O. Box 967, Civic Square Canberra A.C.T. 2608 Australia
Tel.: (61) 2 6274-6464 (61) 2 6257-4150 E-mail: atsbinfo@atsb.gov.au Fax: (61) 2 6274-6474 AFTN: ASCOYLYX Website: http://www.atsb.gov.au
This report is for informational purposes only and contains only information obtained for, or released by, the Government of Australia
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG03WA004
- Event ID
- 20080425X00541
- Case number
- ENG03WA004
- 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.
- No bulk values were replaced by the NTSB case API.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0d94d2feb9ebedc2c94a1aa221781a214c1ff85e9e0df89b11f4d8a9ab71fa80; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:56:36.128Z.