Malaysia Airlines Airbus A330 323 incident
Airbus A330 323 · Incident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD) to Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KUL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG18WA011
- 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 323
- 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
- 9M-MTM
- Operator
- Malaysia Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD), SydneyTo Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KUL), Kuala Lumpur
- 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
- En route · 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 (partial)
- 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 · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On January 18, 2018, about 14:25 Western Australian standard time, a Malaysian-registered Airbus A330-323 airplane had the No. 1 engine, a Pratt & Whitney PW4168A engine shutdown by the flight crew after it had compressor stalls. The airplane, which was operating from Sydney, Australia to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia diverted to Alice Springs, Australia for landing. There were no injuries to the 2 flight crew, 8 flight attendants, and 245 passengers on board.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is investigating this incident.
All inquiries concerning this incident should be the directed to the ATSB.
Australian Transport Safety Bureau
62 Northbourne Avenue
Canberra ACT 2601
Telephone: 1800 020 616
International Telephone: +61 2 6257 4150
Website: www.atsb.gov.au
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG18WA011
- Event ID
- 20180205X20338
- Case number
- ENG18WA011
- 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: 03cbf2855af318f0d9f98330397084554be6f0827ed5e32e5ceab9faa583e4cd; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:25:28.139Z.