JAL Express Boeing 737-846 incident
Boeing 737-846 · Incident
From Tokyo Haneda International Airport (HND) to Matsuyama Airport (MYJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG13WA003
- 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
- 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 737-846
- 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
- JA342J
- Operator
- JAL Express
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tokyo Haneda International Airport (HND), Tokyo, JapanTo Matsuyama Airport (MYJ), Matsuyama
- 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 Tokyo, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On October 20, 2012, a Boeing 737-800, registered JA342J, operated by JAL Express, departed from Tokyo International Airport and declared an emergency No. 1 engine failure during climb. The pilot reported low engine RPM and high exhaust gas temperature warnings. Flight crew operating manual procedures were followed and the No. 1 engine was shutdown before the aircraft returned to Tokyo International Airport for an uneventful single engine landing. No injuries were reported to the 144 passengers and crew members on board.
Damage to the high pressure compressor and turbine blades was noted during a preliminary inspection by ground crews.
The Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) is investigating the incident. The NTSB has was notified of the incident under the provisions of Annex 13 to the Convention of Civil Aviation as the state of manufacture and design for multiple components on the CFM56-7B engine.
All inquiries concerning this incident should be directed to the JTSB at:
Director-General Secretariat of the Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport 2-1-2, Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 100-8918 Japan Tel.: (81) 3 5253 8813 E-mail: ARAIC@mlit.go.jp Fax: (81) 3 5253 1677 AFTN: RJTDYAYA Cable: KOKUKYOKU-TOKYO Website: http://www.motnet.go.jp/araic/index.html
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG13WA003
- Event ID
- 20121105X42658
- Case number
- ENG13WA003
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: 14a1d5050cbb58784cc44207eaf19675b71ed47fe8576653af7b47ac9fe2ab72; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:20:57.083Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: operator. The NTSB narrative names the operator: "a Boeing 737-800, registered JA342J, operated by JAL Express, departed from Tokyo International Airport"