Air Berlin Airbus A330 200 incident
Airbus A330 200 · Incident
From Phuket International Airport (HKT) to Zayed International Airport (AUH)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG13RA009
- 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
- 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
Airbus A330 200
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A330
- 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
- D-ABXA
- Operator
- Air Berlin
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Phuket International Airport (HKT), PhuketTo Zayed International Airport (AUH), Abu Dhabi
- 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
- Minor
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Phuket, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On December 20, 2012, at about 1341 UTC, an Air Berlin Airbus Industrie A330-200 airplane, registered in Germany as D-ABXA, experienced a failure of the left engine, a Pratt & Whitney PW4168, shortly after takeoff from Phuket, Thailand. After the engine failed, the airplane also experienced a hydraulic failure. The airplane returned to Phuket for an overweight landing. There were no injuries to 10 flight crewmembers and 247 passengers on board. The airplane had just departed Phuket for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
The investigation is being conducted by the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation (BFU). As the state of manufacture of the PW4168 engine, the NTSB has designated a U.S. Accredited Representative to assist the BFU with their investigation under the provisions of Annex 13 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation.
All inquiries should be directed to the BFU at: Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation Hermann-Blenk-Str. 16 38108 Braunschweig Germany
Website: http://www.bfu-web.de
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG13RA009
- Event ID
- 20121228X00153
- Case number
- ENG13RA009
- 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.
- No bulk values were replaced by the NTSB case API.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 26a402a6cc3b002bff78c549b3d4d2a785ec195ac5a32e8448994fafda6b82fd; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:40:34.906Z.