Final Thoughts

As mentioned at the beginning of this lesson, the National Airlines Flight 27 incident on November 3, 1973 was a watershed event for the propulsion engineering discipline.

The event crossed a number of disciplines and the failure investigation initially lacked an airplane level awareness. There were two precursor events that did not result in sufficient actions to prevent the National Airlines accident. Existing paradigms relative to protecting the aircraft from the hazards of uncontained engine debris needed to be revisited.

Flight crew interactions were a factor but proved to be a red herring. The root cause of the failure was not the improper flight crew actions in the cockpit but a design problem with the engine.

One success story in this event is that the aircraft design precautions for the uncontained No. 3 engine failure were successful in minimizing an unsafe condition to the aircraft and allowing a successful emergency landing.

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