Federal Express McDonnell Douglas MD-10-30F incident
McDonnell Douglas MD-10-30F · Incident: uncontained engine failure during takeoff
From Portland International Airport (PDX) to Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport (OAK)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG12IA012
- 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
- 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
- Unknown
McDonnell Douglas MD-10-30F
- Aircraft type
- McDonnell Douglas MD-10
- 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
- N304FE
- Operator
- Federal Express
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Portland International Airport (PDX), Portland, ORTo Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport (OAK), Oakland, CA
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Uncontained engine 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On February 13, 2012, a FedEx McDonnell Douglas (Boeing) MD10-30, registration number N304FE, equipped with three General Electric (GE) CF6-50 turbofans engines, performed a rejected take-off due to a failure of the No. 1 (left) engine. No injuries were reported. The incident flight was a regularly scheduled domestic cargo flight, operated under the provisions of Title 14 CFR Part 121, from Portland to Oakland, California. Examination of the airplane revealed no damage or penetration of the cowlings and no damage to the airplane; however, examination of the engine revealed three penetration holes and tears in low pressure turbine case and a single hole located in the turbine rear frame. Disassembly of the incident engine found that the fan mid shaft had fractured and the aft section of the fan mid shaft exhibited a spiral crack angled 45° to the longitudinal axis that measured about 69.5-inches in total length (about 3½ revolutions around the shaft) and extended about 20.5-inches axially in length. Metallurgical examination of the fan mid shaft found that it had fractured entirely in an intergranular mode. The initiation of the spiral fracture was comprised of numerous discolored, thumbnail shaped cracks initiating from the inner diameter surface of the fan mid shaft, some of which had progressed through the fan mid shaft thickness. The morphology of the cracks was consistent with a stress corrosion cracking mechanisms typical of high strength steel such as the fan mid shaft parent material. Localized areas of corrosion pitting, scaling, and loss of the anti-corrosion coating were observed throughout the inner diameter of the fan mid shaft. Examination of the debris within the shaft identified it as an ester based engine oil residue, typical of the kind of oil used in turbine engines. The stress corrosion cracking observed on the fan mid shaft was caused primarily due to the breakdown of a synthetic oil product inside the FMS during both storage and engine operation. The exact source or mechanism by which the oil entered the dry cavity between the fan mid shaft and the center vent tube is unknown.
Probable cause
The fracture of the fan mid shaft due to a stress corrosion cracking initiated by local regions of corrosion pitting, which resulted from oil migration within the shaft and its subsequent degradation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG12IA012
- Event ID
- 20120221X03231
- Case number
- ENG12IA012
- 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: ee21f0feb47f12dbb6a5430baf925faf4f1d6df670295cd0317871b9618f2b51; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:16:52.170Z.