Sabena Brussels Airlines Airbus Industrie A330 incident
Airbus Industrie A330 · Incident
From Brussels to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG04RA001
- 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
Airbus Industrie A330
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A330
- 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
- Operator
- Sabena Brussels Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From BrusselsTo 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
- 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
- None
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Brussels, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On August 9, 2003, a Sabena Brussels Airlines Airbus Industrie A330, registered in Belgium as OO-SFO, had to return to Brussels, Belgium after the pilots felt a vibration in the left engine, a General Electric CF6-80E1turbofan. The airplane was enroute from Brussels at is cruising altitude of 35,000 feet when the pilots reported feeling a short duration, heavy vibration. The pilots reduced the power to idle and returned to Brussels for an uneventful landing.
The investigation of this incident is under the jurisdiction of the Belgium Ministry of Communications and Infrastructure. This report is for information purposes only and contains information that was release by or obtained from the Government of Belgium. Further information pertaining to this incident may be obtained from:
Ministry of Communications and Infrastructure Air Accidents and Investigations Center Communication North - 4th floor Rue du Progres, P.O. Box 5 B-1039 Brussels, Belgium
Fax: (32) 2 277 4260
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG04RA001
- Event ID
- 20080506X00612
- Case number
- ENG04RA001
- 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: damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: dd81f38ce2f3d36ab91d2108ca68bcb1a6b65eb2e517fa569fe9fc5f15a435f4; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:42:27.467Z.