Delta Air Lines Flight 1288 was expected to travel between Pensacola, Florida, and Atlanta, Georgia on July 6, 1996. The McDonnell Douglas MD-88 was equipped with Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 engines and the left engine experienced a serious malfunction with the turbine. The failure led to debris from the front of the engine entering the fuselage, killing two persons and badly injuring another two, with all the individuals belonging to the same family. The tragedy has had a deep impact on how people perceived air travel, especially considering that most of the passengers on the plane were going on vacation. While there was some speculation with regard to the incident, most engineers agreed upon the circumstances in which it happened. "The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the fracture of the left engine's front compressor fan hub, which resulted from the failure of Delta Air Lines' fluorescent penetrant inspection process to detect a detectable fatigue crack initiating from an area of altered microstructure that was created during the drilling process by Volvo for Pratt & Whitney and that went undetected at the time of manufacture." (AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT REPORT UNCONTAINED ENGINE FAILURE DELTA AIR LINES FLIGHT 1288 MCDONNELL...

Even with this, engineers and officers in charge of the plane considered that the matter was not actually serious and that the plane was perfectly able to fly to Atlanta. Furthermore, the First Officers also reported that several rivets were missing from the left wing, this contributing to the idea that there was something wrong with the left engine -- something that was powerful enough to cause the rivets to be removed. This makes it possible to observe how the accident could have been prevented if the First Officer would have paid more attention to the connection between oil leaking from the engine and the rivets that were missing from the wing. The fact that the man was more concerned about declaring the aircraft airworthy than in actually examining the poor condition that the left side of the plane was in can be considered to have played an important role in making the incident possible.
While a large part of the fault can be attributed to…