Delta Air Lines Flight 1288
McDonnell Douglas MD-88 · Uncontained engine failure
From Pensacola International Airport (PNS) to Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA96MA068
- 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
- Event fatalities
- 2 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- Occupants
- 142
- Survivors
- 140
- InjuriesFatal: death within 30 days. Serious: over 48 hours in hospital within a week, most broken bones, severe bleeding, nerve or organ damage, or serious burns. Minor: anything less. Glossary
- 7
- 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
McDonnell Douglas MD-88
- Flight
- DL1288
- Aircraft type
- McDonnell Douglas MD-88
- 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
- N927DA
- Operator
- Delta Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pensacola International Airport (PNS)To Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), Atlanta, GA
- 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
- Takeoff · roll/run
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, inspection, inadequate
- Compressor assembly, rotor disc › Fatigue
- Compressor assembly, rotor disc › Fractured
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
From the Wikipedia article
Delta Air Lines Flight 1288 was a regularly scheduled flight from Pensacola, Florida, to Atlanta, Georgia. On July 6, 1996, the aircraft serving the flight, a McDonnell Douglas MD-88, was on takeoff roll from Runway 17 at Pensacola when it experienced an uncontained, catastrophic turbine engine failure that caused debris from the front compressor hub of the left engine to penetrate the left aft fuselage, killing 2 passengers. The cause of the engine failure was found to have been a fault in the manufacture of the fan. The failure of the airline to spot the resulting crack in the blade was a contributing factor.
The impact killed a female passenger and her son, and seven other passengers were injured. The pilot aborted takeoff and the airplane stopped on the runway. Three other passengers sustained minor injuries during the emergency evacuation. Most of the passengers were traveling on vacation.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Delta Air Lines Flight 1288” (revision 1374594252, retrieved 2026-09-18) by its authors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Extracted as plain text: references, tables, images and some sections are left out. Read the article
NTSB narrative
During the initial part of its takeoff roll, the airplane experienced an engine failure. Uncontained engine debris from the front compressor front hub (fan hub) of the #1 (left) engine penetrated the left aft fuselage. Two passengers were killed and two others were seriously injured. The takeoff was rejected, and the airplane was stopped on the runway. The fan hub had fractured through a tierod hole and blade slot. Some form of drill breakage or drill breakdown, combined with localized loss of coolant and chip packing, had occurred during the drilling process, creating an altered microstructure and ladder cracking in the fan hub. Drilling damage extended much deeper into hole sidewall material than previously anticipated by P & W. Fatigue cracks initiated from the ladder cracking in the tierod hole and began propagating almost immediately after the hub was put into service in 1990. The crack was large enough to have been detectable during the last fluorescent penetrant inspection at Delta. Delta's nondetection of the crack was caused either by a failure of the cleaning and fluorescent penetrant inspection processing, a failure of the inspector to detect the crack, or some combination of these factors.
Probable cause
the fracture of the left engine's front compressor fan hub, which resulted from the failure of Delta Air Lines' fluorescent penetrant inspection process to detect a detectable fatigue crack initiating from an area of altered microstructure that was created during the drilling process by Volvo for Pratt & Whitney and that went undetected at the time of manufacture. Contributing to the accident was the lack of sufficient redundancy in the in-service inspection program. (NTSB Report AAR-98/01)
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
Wikipedia article: Delta Air Lines Flight 1288
- Article
- Delta Air Lines Flight 1288
- Revision
- 1374594252 · 2026-09-13 · retrieved 2026-09-18
- Wikidata
- Q5254563
- Licence
- Text CC BY-SA 4.0, by the article's authors; Wikidata CC0; town positions GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
NTSB record DCA96MA068
- Event ID
- 20001208X06203
- Case number
- DCA96MA068
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Where each value comes from
- Record
- Wikipedia article "Delta Air Lines Flight 1288" (page 46695344, revision 1374594252); merged with NTSB case DCA96MA068 (events / aircraft)
- Date
- NTSB record DCA96MA068: NTSB narrative opening date, consistent with the API date and time (local date)
- Place and country
- Wikipedia infobox: site; country from NTSB record DCA96MA068
- Map position
- NTSB record DCA96MA068: events decimal coordinates
- Aircraft, operator and route
- NTSB record DCA96MA068: aircraft; gaps from Wikipedia infobox: aircraft type, registration, operator, origin and destination; route airports from the linked airport articles' Wikidata codes (OurAirports)
- Operation
- NTSB record DCA96MA068: operated under Part 121: Air Carrier
- Fatalities
- NTSB record DCA96MA068: NTSB API totalFatal
- Ground fatalities
- NTSB record DCA96MA068: NTSB API ongroundFatal
- Summary
- Wikipedia infobox: summary
Source notes (3)
- One occurrence in two sources, merged: the Wikipedia article "Delta Air Lines Flight 1288" and NTSB case DCA96MA068, matched by the same aircraft registration and date. For this US event the NTSB's values are used where the two differ; each value names its source.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. 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.