Delta 1288 designation and characteristics

Delta Air Lines Flight 1288 was expected to travel between Pensacola, Florida, and Atlanta, Georgia on July 6, 1996. The McDonnell Douglas MD-88 was equipped with Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 engines and the left engine experienced a serious malfunction with the turbine. The failure led to debris from the front of the engine entering the fuselage, killing two persons and badly injuring another two, with all the individuals belonging to the same family. The tragedy has had a deep impact on how people perceived air travel, especially considering that most of the passengers on the plane were going on vacation.

While there was some speculation with regard to the incident, most engineers agreed upon the circumstances in which it happened. "The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the fracture of the left engine's front compressor fan hub, which resulted from the failure of Delta Air Lines' fluorescent penetrant inspection process to detect a detectable fatigue crack initiating from an area of altered microstructure that was created during the drilling process by Volvo for Pratt & Whitney and that went undetected at the time of manufacture." (AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT REPORT UNCONTAINED ENGINE FAILURE DELTA AIR LINES FLIGHT 1288 MCDONNELL DOUGLAS MD-88, N927DA PENSACOLA, FLORIDA JULY 6, 1996) Most individuals involved in the incident's analysis expressed issues about how the authorities initially perceived a problem with the engine that malfunctioned.

The left engine had apparently been leaking a few drops of oil during the pre-flight inspection. Even with this, engineers and officers in charge of the plane considered that the matter was not actually serious and that the plane was perfectly able to fly to Atlanta. Furthermore, the First Officers also reported that several rivets were missing from the left wing, this contributing to the idea that there was something wrong with the left engine -- something that was powerful enough to cause the rivets to be removed. This makes it possible to observe how the accident could have been prevented if the First Officer would have paid more attention to the connection between oil leaking from the engine and the rivets that were missing from the wing. The fact that the man was more concerned about declaring the aircraft airworthy than in actually examining the poor condition that the left side of the plane was in can be considered to have played an important role in making the incident possible.

While a large part of the fault can be attributed to the faulty state of the left side of the plain, it only seems natural to consider that the service inspection program was also responsible for the incident. The fact that these people were unwilling to provide further attention to the faulty state of the aircraft led to the disaster. Regardless or not if manufacturing defects were a cause of the problem, the inspectors' failure to realize the poor condition that the left engine was in can be considered to be one of the greatest problems concerning the accident.

A series of pre-flight tests would have certainly prevented the incident. If aircraft operators would have formed a task force that would be capable to comprehend the limitations associated with manufacturing, this respective task force would have identified potential problems that the aircraft could come across and would have immediately realized that something was seriously wrong at the time when they would have seen oil leaking from the engine and the rivets missing from the wing.

Non-destructive testing should be a principal concept when considering pre-flight analysis of an aircraft. If inspectors were to perform a series of tests on the wing and the engine, they would have probably caused the engine to malfunction and the debris coming from the wing to strike the plane while no one was inside of it.

Even with the fact that the incident was tragic, the largest fault can be attributed to Delta's inspectors' failure to realize the fragile condition that the engine was in. Most facts pointed toward the belief that the aircraft was not airworthy and yet these people did not signal any serious problems and practically considered that it was more important for the aircraft to complete its mission rather than to prevent it from flying and to actually realize the imminent threat that it represented.