Alitalia Airlines Boeing MD-11F incident
Boeing MD-11F · Incident: powerplant system/component malfunction/failure during landing
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG08IA027
- 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
- 0
- 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 MD-11F
- Aircraft type
- Boeing MD-11
- 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
- EI-UPO
- Operator
- Alitalia 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
- Part 129: Foreign
- 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
- Landing · landing roll
- 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
- Powerplant system/component malfunction/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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane’s No. 3 engine thrust reverser lost a large section of its inboard translating cowling (transcowl) after thrust reverser deployment at landing. A postincident inspection found that two of the three transcowl attachments (the lower and the center) had failed. The lower ballscrew actuator attachment had failed in fatigue at its rod end. The center (CDU) attachment had failed in overload at the clevis assembly bracket attachment rivets.
A fatigue analysis of the various rod ends qualified for use on CF6-80C2 series thrust reverser adjustable-length ballscrew actuators found that four of the 3/8-inch rod end part numbers (P/Ns), including P/N KBE6-59, which was on this thrust reverser, lacked sufficient predicted fatigue life.
A design validation of the CF6-80C2 thrust reverser actuating system (TRAS) found that TRAS end-of-stroke impact loads can induce torque loading at the rod ends and clevis assembly bracket attachment rivets that result in bending loads not accounted for in the original design. The design validation also found that the fatigue tolerance capability of the CDU clevis bracket attachment fasteners was marginal for the “one actuator out” (OAO) condition under normal deploy loads.
Probable cause
The insufficient predicted fatigue life of the P/N KBE6-59 adjustable-length 3/8-inch rod end, and the inadequate fatigue margin at the transcowl CDU clevis assembly bracket attachment rivets for the one actuator out condition, which resulted in the failure of a second transcowl attachment during thrust reverser activation, leading to the partial liberation of the thrust reverser’s inboard transcowl.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG08IA027
- Event ID
- 20081003X63358
- Case number
- ENG08IA027
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: ea5d7373ef49f676203e04221775d329085300a0392fc744d12d8b1343bcf6ac; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:21:50.695Z.