LISTEN: Commercial Jet Flies Nearly 300 Hours with Tool Stuck in its Engine

Chalk this one up to either dumb luck or stupid-mistake resistance design, but a commercial jet just managed to fly the equivalent of almost two weeks with a tool stuck in one of its engines.

A newly published report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau details the adventures of the Airbus A380 that picked up the stowaway on December 7, 2023 after maintenance engineers forgot about the lost tool procedure sending the aircraft back into service. The Qantas Airways jet was in Los Angeles while undergoing an inspection on the left outboard engine’s intermediate-pressure compressor. One of the engineers who had checked out the tool, a roughly four-foot nylon rod, headed out early for a medical appointment and left the remainder of the inspection to the other engineer. When the work was finished, the subsequent inspections failed to see the tool still stuck in the engine compressor.

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