Earlier this morning I posted about the GE jet engine which exploded due to fatigue. It quickly became one of our most visited stories today.
Craig, a pilot, commented on his impressions of the GE CF-6 in the comments area and said that he only knew of one in-air incident with the engine, which caused an unscheduled landing of the plane. He guessed that because the media was nearby and able to access the scene of the explosion, that caused coverage of the incident out of proportion to its significance.
GE's web page for the engine in question shows that it has a long and industrious history for GE as a workhorse engine. The CF-6 has been in production for more than 30 years, since 1971, and it is the most common high bypass turbofan around. It's very common in widebody aircraft like the Airbus, the A300 series, the Boeing 767 and 747, and the DC-10.
The engine does have some history of 'uncontained failures.' This site points out pictures of the recent failure and notes that in January of this year the NTSB put out a notice about the particular engine in question due to an incident in December of 2002 from an 'uncontained failure' as well as an earlier report in September of 2000.
Past issues with the CF-6 have led to federal warnings and regulated increased inspections, and the preventative maintenance has prevented issues. The last failure was contained because pilots reported an issue with the engine, and it was being further tested when it failed. This is a great example of how extra caution, and protective mechanisms by the people running aircraft maintenance, can overcome the natural capacity of machines to eventually wear out.
Should one be worried about flying on a machine with a CF-6? Chances are you already have. These engines are on some 1,900 aircraft taking off some 4,150 times a day. The engine line has some 260 million flight hours logged. One must judge for one's self, but a handful of incidents over 260 million hours is still low. With the new NTSB recommendations and more scrutiny, the fact that this latest incident occured in testing conditions means that preventative measures will be taken.
If you're interested in seeing how some of GE's jet engines are made, including the CF-6, this Fast Company article
about the innovative GE plant down in Durham, NC, might be of interest.
update: Rick Kennedy of GE Aviation commented to BlogginStocks about the CF-6 80A engine, saying that "since September 2000, three CF6-80 engines built between 1981 and 2001 have experienced HPT disc failures. In each case, a crack was initiated at the dovetail slot bottom." He maintains that GE is working very closely with everyone about this, and that since 2001, GE has initiated an aggressive inspection program of the engines, checking almost 2/3rds of the 3,400 CF-6 80A engines in existence, and that no failures of the engines have happened that have undergone the HPT disk inspection of the dove slot, which is where the issue seems to be coming from.
[photo credit: wikipedia, Jean-François Goyette]
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