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.