US: Fatal jet-engine blast happened while maker planned expanded safety checks

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/>