Feb 23, 2021
The midair disintegration of a jet engine over suburban Denver Saturday is the latest in a string of failures that has raised alarm among regulators about debris evading shielding that’s supposed to keep broken parts from hitting aircraft.
The incident aboard United Airlines flight 328, which showered neighborhoods with metal debris, appears to have been the fifth in five years in which a fan blade broke and destroyed the front section of the engine, according to accident reports and safety experts. That portion of the engine isn’t as protected as the core areas around the jet turbines that are built to contain material in a failure.
United Airlines' Denver-Hawaii flight, powered by Pratt & Whitney engines, had suffered a mid-air engine failure, resulting in 5 airlines around the world grounding Boeing 777 fleet.
Two injured after plane debris falls from the sky in Netherlands
Two people were injured after pieces of a cargo plane broke off and fell onto a town in the Netherlands, according to authorities there.
Pieces of metal fell on the town of Meerssen after a Boeing 747 cargo plane experienced an engine fire shortly after taking off from Maastricht, according to the Veiligheidsregio (the Dutch regional safety inspector) and Maastricht Aachen Airport (MAA).
The plane was bound for JFK Airport in New York City and was a Boeing 747-400 freighter, according to Longtail Aviation, the charter airline service that owns the plane.