Atlas Air Flight 3885
Boeing 747-87UF · Incident: fire/smoke (non-impact) en route
From an unrecorded airport to Carolina, PR
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA24LA079
- 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
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 747-87UF
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- 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
- N859GT
- Operator
- Atlas Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Carolina, PR
- Aircraft age
- About 9 years (built 2015)
- 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
- 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
- Fire/smoke (non-impact)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the airplane’s initial climb after departure, the flight crew received engine overheat and fire warning indications for the No. 2 engine. The engine was subsequently shut down, one fire bottle was discharged, and the engine fire light extinguished. After declaring a mayday, the flight returned to the airport and made an uneventful landing. A review of the airplane’s maintenance records revealed that, 4 days before the flight, the airplane had undergone a borescope inspection of the No. 2 engine performed by a third-party vendor. The inspection required the removal of the port M borescope plug. The maintenance work card provided instructions for properly reinstalling the borescope plug to ensure that the locking feature was properly engaged. By initialing the work card, the technician who performed the work and the inspector who reviewed the work indicated that this task had been completed in accordance with the maintenance manual procedure. A postincident inspection of the No. 2 engine revealed that the engine cases were intact with no evidence of an uncontained engine failure. The inspection also revealed burn through of the thrust reverser fan duct fixed inner wall located directly over the combustor diffuser nozzle (CDN) port M borescope plug. The CDN case port M borescope plug was not secured in the engine case and was found loose in the engine cowling. The open CDN port allowed hot gases to escape from the engine, which caused thermal damage to the thrust reverser. A postincident inspection of the port M borescope plug revealed no anomalies to the plug’s material composition, dimensions, threads or locking components. The plug was threaded into an exemplar engine without binding or stiffness and locked as designed. Although the work card had been initialed by a technician and an inspector, it is likely that the port M borescope plug was not properly secured and inspected according to maintenance manual procedures and that the improperly secured plug resulted in the engine fire.
Probable cause
Maintenance personnel’s improper installation and inspection of the port M borescope plug, which resulted in an engine fire.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA24LA079
- Event ID
- 20240119193682
- Case number
- DCA24LA079
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2024-01-19.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 03c83759df06bd3528a4e153ea1a02c7d2580c95040d4baac818f6b8ba1d8fa4; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:27:02.601Z.