JetBlue Airways Flight 18
Airbus A320 232 · Incident: electrical system malfunction/failure on approach
From Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG23LA033
- 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
- Completed
- 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
- Unknown
Airbus A320 232
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A320
- 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
- N649JB
- Operator
- JetBlue Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL), Fort Lauderdale, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 17 years (built 2006)
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Electrical system malfunction/failure
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Information received from JetBlue maintenance and the download of the number 1 generator control unit (GCU) indicated that the number 1 integrated drive generator (IDG) had tripped offline twice over the five days before the incident flight. The digital flight data recorder (DFDR) and GCU data showed that, during the incident flight, the number 1 IDG tripped offline, followed by the number 2 IDG. The loss of both IDGs caused the airplane to enter the emergency electrical configuration and deploy the ram air turbine (RAT). Given the electrical configuration of the airplane at the loss of the number 2 IDG (the APU was not online), the emergency electrical configuration change would cause a temporary loss of the flight deck displays as the electrical system transitioned to power from the RAT. The examination of both the airplane’s IDGs revealed that all of the fixed cylinder block bores were worn beyond tolerance. The IDG manufacturer Collins Aerospace indicated that worn cylinder block bores would make it difficult for an IDG to maintain a constant and consistent frequency; fluctuations in the frequency of the IDG’s output power made it susceptible to faults that could cause the IDG to trip offline.
Probable cause
The loss of both Integrated Drive Generators (IDG) due to worn fixed cylinder block bores, which caused the IDGs to be tripped offline and caused the airplane to enter an emergency electrical configuration.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG23LA033
- Event ID
- 20230816192883
- Case number
- ENG23LA033
- 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: investigation status, coordinates, cause areas, 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: 80a8432f92dd71f9fdbed02ee504fc2b589576e58b2a49626fd9a98ba94cfe8c; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:00:43.769Z.