American Airlines Flight 837
Boeing 767 323 · Incident: fire/smoke (non-impact) during initial climb
From John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to Toussaint Louverture International Airport (PAP)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG12IA010
- 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
- Not recorded
Boeing 767 323
- 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
- N360AA
- Operator
- American Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), Jamaica, NYTo Toussaint Louverture International Airport (PAP), Port au Prince
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Fire/smoke (non-impact)
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On February 8, 2012, American Airlines flight 837, a Boeing 767-323ER, had a fire in the right engine, a General Electric (GE) CF6-80C2B6, shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), Jamaica, New York. The pilots reported that as the airplane was climbing through 9,000 feet, they heard a bang that was immediately followed by a right engine fire warning in the cockpit. The pilots further stated that they shutdown the right engine and discharged both fire bottles into the right engine’s nacelle before the fire warning was extinguished. The pilots also stated that they declared an emergency and returned to JFK for a single-engine, overweight landing without further incident. When the right engine was wet motored, fuel leaked from the front of the integrated drive generator (IDG) fuel-oil heat exchanger. The examination of the front of the IDG fuel-oil heat exchanger revealed there was a pre-service bulletin 73-0242 two-piece bracket and spray shield that had been misinstalled with the bracket over the spray shield rather than the spray shield being over the bracket. American Airlines aviation maintenance technicians replaced the right engine's fuel flow transmitter and an adjacent fuel tube during the previous night requiring the removal and reinstallation of the bracket and spray shield on the front of the IDG fuel-oil heat exchanger. A seal under the fuel tube flange that is held in place by the bracket had the O-ring partially missing, which was the source of the fuel leak.
Probable cause
The failure of the American Airlines aviation maintenance technicians to properly reassemble the two-piece bracket and spray shield on the integrated drive generator fuel-oil heat exchanger that caused a fuel leak that sprayed out and ignited on hot engine cases. Contributing to the cause of the fire was the 767 Aircraft Maintenance Manual’s lack of any graphical or pictorial displays of the correct assembly of the two-piece bracket and spray shield.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG12IA010
- Event ID
- 20120208X70842
- Case number
- ENG12IA010
- 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, 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: 4be3258246e043bbb5cb283ffc6f2ef7f6666958ae01c41652497573bf98e18b; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:12:29.839Z.