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Atlas / NTSB / FTW85LA116

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event FTW85LA116

1985-02-03 SHEFFIELD, Texas, United States None 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Aircraft involved

Factual narrative

THE PLT STATED THE ENG FAILED COMPLETELY DURING CRUISE. THE CRANKSHAFT WAS FOUND SEPARATED DURING THE ENG TEARDOWN, WITH THE ROD AND BEARINGS ALSO SEPARATED. METALLURGICAL TESTING REVEALED FRACTURES TO BE FROM FATIGUE. ENG MAINTENANCE HAD BEEN IMPROPERLY ACCOMPLISHED DURING REPLACEMENT OF PISTONS AND ROD COMPONENTS. RODS HAD NOT BEEN PROPERLY ALIGNED, THUS ALLOWING BEARINGS AND CAPS TO RUB AND GROOVE THE CRANKSHAFT, CAUSING THE FAILURE POINT. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database (Pre-2008 Archive) Retrieved: 2026-02-12

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_1985_FTW85LA116.txt. Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb. Full investigation docket on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Related research

What the literature says.

Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type or causal vocabulary (maintenance). Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.

Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗