Fallen Engine Piece is Wake-Up Call

Jan. 16 -- Sleeping in her home not far from Chicago's Midway Airport, Dorothy Gohn was awakened by a heavy thud at 1:15 one morning last week. Startled, she spotted a Frisbee-size wheel two feet from the foot of her bed, and when she touched it, her finger was singed.

Thinking part of her ceiling fan had collapsed, the retired musician and church organist fell back to a restless sleep. The next morning, Gohn, 75, learned the truth: The wheel, so scorching it burned through the carpeting, was an engine part that had fallen from a cargo plane flying overhead.

"It might have decapitated her, because it was coming in like a Frisbee on fire," said Jim Schuermann, a neighbor who helped Gohn unravel the mystery. "I thought, wow, it was a lucky day for this woman."

Friday's near-miss was the latest in a series of mishaps in an industry plagued by safety breakdowns and dangerous practices, a yearlong Miami Herald investigation found.

The Colorado-based carrier, American Check Transport, has a history of three fatal crashes that killed four pilots this decade. The type of plane flown that morning, the Mitsubishi MU-2 turboprop, has been involved in seven deadly cargo crashes this decade.

Said Gohn: "I just hope they can regulate these planes like that so nothing like that could ever happen again."

Engine Failure

The MU-2 had departed Milwaukee at 12:45 a.m. and was near Midway when it suffered an engine failure on approach, said Tony Molinaro, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman for the Great Lakes region based in Chicago.

In the sky over a residential community, a turbine wheel, about 12 inches in diameter, came off the back of the engine, he said. The wheel is a disc that holds turbine blades in an engine.

"It's the hottest part of the engine. It's the most critical rotating element," said Bart Crotty, a former FAA inspector who is now an aviation safety consultant. "If that thing fails on you, often it's a catastrophic failure."

In one of every four cargo accidents this decade, The Miami Herald found, planes suffered mechanical failings that had gone undetected by companies or the FAA.

While the official cause of Friday's near-miss won't be determined for months, equipment failure was at play: The engine's turbine wheel literally dislodged from the plane.

American Check Transport does business under the name Flight Line and often serves the banking industry. A company official on Monday declined to discuss the carrier's record of fatal crashes, which the government attributed to pilot error and other factors, but said it will search for causes to this latest incident.

"Obviously, it concerns us and we will indeed send that engine to the manufacturer to find out what caused it," said Stephen Edner, Flight Line's director of operations.

Mitsubishi officials maintain their plane is safe and note that the problem appears to have originated in an engine built by Honeywell.

"It's extremely rare for an engine to come apart at any point, because there are an awful lot of safeguards," said Ralph Sorrells, with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America. "We will have to wait and see what Honeywell and the FAA will say to that."

A Honeywell spokesman said the company could not yet comment. It is likely the company will work with the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation into Friday's events.

A newspaper review of air cargo accidents found mechanical breakdowns involving broken propellers and long-deteriorating pistons and landing equipment, triggering crashes that endangered pilots and people on the ground.

In her bed asleep, less than a mile from Midway, Gohn had no clue what had just happened.

"You don't think there is something that is going to come through your roof from an airplane," she said. "It was just such an unusual occurrence, but when I think about it now, I can't imagine they would put an aircraft in service like that, that had so many problems."

'Oh, My God'

The next morning, she called Schuermann, who crawled into her attic space, spotted a hole in the roof and knew it had nothing to do with the ceiling fan.

'It's got to be something from an airplane. I was thinking, 'Oh, my God. If it hit the bed, it might have got the bed on fire,' " he said.

They called Chicago authorities, who alerted the FAA, which traced the serial number back to the company's plane. The FAA found the airplane in the hangar at Midway.

"We found the plane ourselves," Molinaro said.

He said the pilot and the company were required to report the incident immediately but had not.

Flight Line's Edner said that is not true. He said the pilot told the tower he had lost an engine, and that the company began its own inquiry -- unaware that a piece of the engine had hit a house until news reports surfaced.

"Our company and that pilot did exactly everything according to the regulations," Edner said.

As of Monday afternoon, company officials had not spoken to the victim.

"I haven't heard a word from them," Gohn said.

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