Key Lime Air Flight 168
Fairchild SA227 AC · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Garfield County Regional Airport (RIL) to Denver International Airport (DEN)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA202
- 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
- Accident
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Fairchild SA227 AC
- Aircraft type
- Fairchild SA227
- 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
- N2691W
- Operator
- Key Lime Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Garfield County Regional Airport (RIL), Rifle, COTo Denver International Airport (DEN), Denver, CO
- Aircraft age
- About 29 years (built 1986)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot departed in the twin-engine airplane for a scheduled, domestic cargo flight. He reported that, during the climb, he heard a "bang," which was followed by a loss of engine power and fire indications from the right engine. The pilot declared an emergency and diverted to another airport for an instrument approach and landed uneventfully.
Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the right engine's second-stage turbine rotor had separated. One portion of the rotor exited through the left side of the engine and nacelle structure, penetrated the right side of the fuselage, and came to rest inside the fuselage wall. Other portions of the separated rotor exited through the right side of the engine. The engine and the inside of the nacelle structure exhibited fire damage, but no evidence of a sustained fire was found in that area. The examination of the turbine engine revealed fatigue cracks on the second-stage rotor disk, which indicates that the rotor disk likely failed due to fatigue, and this likely resulted in the uncontained engine failure.
Probable cause
The uncontained engine failure due to the fatigue failure of the second-stage turbine rotor disk.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA202
- Event ID
- 20150420X02310
- Case number
- CEN15LA202
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2015-04-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: da8bc0ee776e398cc1190472f16906cb8bf11230396afe8cc41868db3614f311; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:14:26.499Z.