The maker of the engine that blew up on a Southwest jet last week was getting ready to recommend inspections that would have included that engine right before the fatal accident. Engine maker CFM International, in response to a similar malfunction in 2016, had recommended last year that carriers inspect a limited population of older fan blades that didn’t include the one that failed last week. But a draft recommendation circulated to some carriers for their input would have expanded the list enough to include the engine that was powering Flight 1380 when a fan blade broke off midair over Pennsylvania. Those recommendations were the basis of the emergency inspections ordered last Friday by the US FAA. The company’s recommendations “had been in the works for weeks before the incident,” said CFM spokesman Rick Kennedy. It’s unclear whether the expanded inspections would have happened in time to prevent last week’s accident. The expansion of engine inspections was part of the process of trying to gather data on an extremely rare failure like the one that occurred two years ago and was not because of any indication of an impending risk of another blade failure, Kennedy said. “We’re on the very front end of trying to understand this phenomenon,” Kennedy said. "The biggest challenge in our industry is managing something that’s exceedingly rare. You don’t have a baseline." <br/>
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A 43-year-old man and his 34-year-old wife have been arrested at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on suspicion of smuggling methamphetamine with an approximate street value of Y1.8b, police and customs officials said Monday. The amount, about 30 kilograms, is the largest haul Japanese customs have confiscated in a stimulant drug smuggling case involving a passenger jet, the officials said. Kazuki Sato and his wife Natsumi are suspected of attempting to smuggle the illegal drug in their checked luggage — divided into 30 coffee pouches in two sports bags — from an airport in Nairobi, Kenya, to Haneda on April 4. Customs officials at Haneda found the hidden narcotics during a luggage inspection and contacted the police. The couple has visited Kenya multiple times since 2014 along with their 15-year-old and 5-year-old sons. Kazuki told investigators he had been asked by a man he met at a bar in Yokohama to become a drug courier for him, and had since smuggled drugs six times for payments ranging from Y4m to Y10m per trip.<br/>