United Air Lines Boeing 777-222 incident
Boeing 777-222 · Incident
From Incheon International Airport (ICN) to Narita International Airport (NRT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG13WA010
- 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 777-222
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 777
- 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
- N206UA
- Operator
- United Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Incheon International Airport (ICN), Seoul, South KoreaTo Narita International Airport (NRT), Tokyo, Japan
- 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
- 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 Seoul, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On December 31, 2012, a United Airlines Boeing 777, registration number N206UA, experienced a No.1 (left)engine failure while passing through flight level (FL)250. The crew received an “ENG FAIL” Engine Indicating and Crew Alerting (EICAS) message. The Flight Crew declared an emergency and returned to the Incheon International Airport, Seoul, South Korea for an uneventful landing. Post landing inspection revealed metal fragments in the No. 1 engine chip detector.
The REPUBLIC OF KOREA Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board Ministry of Construction and Transportation is investigating the accident. As the state of manufacture of the engines, the NTSB has designated a U.S. Accredited Representative under the provisions of Annex 13 to the Convention on Civil Aviation to assist ARAIB in their investigation.
All inquiries concerning this accident should be directed to ARAIB at:
REPUBLIC OF KOREA Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board Ministry of Construction and Transportation 281, Gonghang-Dong Gangseo-gu, Seoul Republic of Korea 157-815
Tel.: (82) 2 6096-1017 (82) 2 6096-1030 (24 hours) E-mail: byeonsc@moct.go.kr Fax: (82) 2 6096-1031 AFTN: RKSLYLYX Website: http://www.araib.go.kr
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG13WA010
- Event ID
- 20121231X35943
- Case number
- ENG13WA010
- 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: b01dc03a5e375c820cfd4697383e1988b78e46f36e1d63c49d2b98b44bea7918; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:40:59.850Z.