Estonia Air Boeing 737 500 incident
Boeing 737 500 · Incident
From Vilnius International Airport (VNO) to Stockholm-Arlanda Airport (ARN)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG11WA041
- 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 737 500
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- Category
- Airplane · from aircraft type
- 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
- ES-ABL
- Operator
- Estonia Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Vilnius International Airport (VNO), VilniusTo Stockholm-Arlanda Airport (ARN), Stockholm
- 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 Vilnius, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On January 14, 2011, an Estonia Air Boeing 737-500, registered in Estonia as ES-ABL, lost power from the right engine, a CFMI CFM56-3C1, at FL 360 and returned back to Vilnius, Lithuania. The airplane was operating on a regularly scheduled flight from Vilnius to Stockholm, Sweden. After landing, metal chips were found on the right engine's accessory gearbox magnetic chip detector. There were no reported injuries.
The investigation is under the jurisdiction of the Government of Estonia. Further information may be obtained from:
Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications Crisis Management Department Harju 11 Tallinn, Estonia Phone: +372 62 56 342 Fax: +372 6 313 660 Email: info@mkm.ee
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG11WA041
- Event ID
- 20110726X30059
- Case number
- ENG11WA041
- 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: damage. 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: d7bf4ad86fa6e1759df19e9fadb07a16946dbe49a4ca1a98ec9ac1a5e1c2dbe5; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:30:52.263Z.