Incident Overview
Description
An YPF Hawker Siddeley HS-748 crashed near Cutral-C¢,Argentina, following a failure of the right-hand wing, killing all 34 occupants. The Avro 748 aircraft, named “Ciudad de Corrientes”, was making a staff-transfer flight for the Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales (YPF) State Enterprise. It began in Cutral-C¢ at 14:00 and the aircraft landed 40 minutes later on a Company landing strip in Rinc¢n de Los Sauces. The aircraft took off at 15:55 for Cutral-C¢ again with 31 passengers and 3 crew. At 16:23 the crew contacted Cutral-C¢ and asked for information on the local state of the weather and estimated landing at 16:33. At an altitude of about 4000 feet the starboard wing failed, followed by separation of the starboard tailplane. The remainder of the plane corkscrewed and crashed. PROBABLE CAUSE; “The accident was the result of detachment of the right hand wing in normal flight, through structural failure of the wing in the area between stringers 3 and 12 and in the area of the engine outer rib. Within the area indicated, one may identify among the origins of the fatigue the reinforcing plate, and especially, the holes in it for rivets. The cause of these fatigue cracks, since the material of which they were made was satisfactory, must be attributed to stress concentration in the area concerned due to geometry of the design, these cracks becoming critical sooner than had been estimated. The cracks remained undetected and became critical because the manufacturer’s inspection programme for the area concerned was insufficiently precise and made it possible for the operator not to detect and correct them in time.”
Primary Cause
Structural failure of the right-hand wing through detachment of the reinforcing plate and holes in the wing, resulting in fatigue cracks.Structural failure of the right-hand wing through detachment of the reinforcing plate and holes in the wing, resulting in fatigue cracks.Share on:
