Plane engine fire prompts investigation at Chicago's O'Hare airport

Investigators were scouring Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Saturday after an engine caught fire on an American Airlines plane attempting to take off Friday, as a source said a detached engine part had hit a nearby building, something the design should have prevented. No serious injuries were reported in the incident, which crippled a Boeing 767 with 161 passengers and nine crew members aboard as it was departing for Miami and briefly closed all O’Hare’s runways. The failure was so intense that a disk from the engine hit a building roof. Jet engines are designed to keep parts within the outer cover as escaped shrapnel can tear through the cabin or rupture fuel tanks in the wings. Such “uncontained” failures therefore are extremely rare and NTSB officials were looking for clues as to whether the fault lay with the engine, with maintenance or a freak event such as debris on the runway entering the engine. The General Electric engine that powered the plane was a workhorse model known as the CF6 introduced decades ago, GE spokesman Rick Kennedy told Reuters on Saturday. The American Airlines plane dates from the 1980s or 1990s, and had been serviced by the airline, he said. Officials from GE Aviation, Boeing and American Airlines were on the scene at O’Hare assisting in the investigation, GE’s Kennedy said. The O’Hare incident marks the third uncontained GE engine failure in little over a year, following a British Airways Boeing 777 in September 2015 and a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 in August. Both aircraft used different engines, the GE90 and CMF56, made by a joint venture of GE and Safran of France.<br/>