The Sept. 30, 2017 Air France Airbus A380 flight was four hours into its journey from Paris to Los Angeles when the flight crew heard an explosion as the fan hub of the right outer engine (the No. 4 engine) separated into at least three parts, with debris striking the aircraft before falling to the ground.
All of the 497 passengers, 21 cabin crewmembers and three pilots were uninjured in the 2017 incident. The crew diverted the A380 to Goose Bay Airport in Labrador, Canada, and landed “without any particular difficulty” although parts of the engine were missing, including most of the fan hub and fan blades, the inlet cone the air inlet cover and right and left engine cowlings, the French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) said in its final report on the accident.
The BEA report cited several factors as likely contributors to the accident, including “the engine designer’s/manufacturer’s lack of knowledge of the cold dwell fatigue phenomenon in the titani…
