The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. --Coredesat 01:55, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

United Airlines Flight 897[edit]

United Airlines Flight 897 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Very non-notable event, engine fire, no major damage, no one was hurt. There are two refs, but this falls into the category of news of the moment without any lasting importance. Though we at the Air Accident Task Force haven't finalized incident/accident notability standards, this most certainly would fall outside of them. AKRadecki^Speaketh 17:36, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Note that rather POV comment on the article's talk page as well. AKRadecki^Speaketh 19:28, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - For reasons given. - BillCJ 18:02, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge into a larger article on, or list of airline accidents. There can be an article of ones by country, or by year, or by airline. The individual events may not deserve their own article space, but there needs to be an article consisting of the shorter incidents. Airline safety is an important topic. For an example see: List of United States foodborne illness outbreaks --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 18:10, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as proposed, would not be notable for the airline accident page either. MilborneOne 18:29, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge Strongly disagree with proposed deletion -- This was a flight to Beijing from Washington. What if the fire occurred over the Pacific or Washington D.C. and fire containment systems failed? This incident is of note just for that foreseeable possibility of this kind of event. Such an incident, if the engine had cought fire over the ocean, could have resulted in the loss of all 349 people on the flight. If fire containment systems had failed over Washington D.C., you could conceivably have a situation like the 747 that lost one engine, which knocked another engine of the wing, resulting in loss of control, where the 747 crashed into an apartment building, killing many more people than were on the cargo plane. Post 9/11, this incident should receive permanent mention here and the investigation results should be tracked here fro the public to see. If fire containment systems had failed ove Washington, D.C., you could have easily had a fully fueled out of control jet much larger than any hijacked on 9/11 crashing into the Capitol, White House, Pentagon, etc., causing a castrophe much greater that that the terrorists caused in Washington on 9/11. I know these engines intimately, as I used to inspect their build up into an assembly from a core engine while I was an inspector at Boeing. I also inspected the struts/pylons that held these engines to the wings. You can find some of my experiences as an inspector at Boeing at thelastinspector.com. After viewing that info, I don't think you will be about as non-confident as I am about the integrity of these fire detection and containment systems. Indeed, just before I left Boeing, I identified many flaws in the engineering of the fire detection systems of these very engines. I have no idea if these defects I reported to Engineering were ever fixed. Remember that when you want to deep six this type of crucial information for the public. Its a good thing the fire was noticed by the crew/passengers on this flight. Even though noone died, there should be a section of this web site that compiles all of these mear-miss disasters and tracks their causes. The Last Inspector 19:30, 6 June 2007 (UTC) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:United_Airlines_Flight_897"[reply]
  • comment - (partial copy of my response to this on the talk page) First of all, Wikipedia is not an advocacy site, and we aren't interested in "what if's" Our standards involve notability, and articles here are evaluated based on whether it meets certain criteria. Engine fires just are not that uncommon, and you can see that in the NTSB database. Because we're not an advocacy site, our articles are not vehicles to expose information to the public or to otherwise promote your concerns with Boeing. Further, your username being that as your website name raises some serious conflict of interest and NPOV questions, as does these comments being your very first edits at Wikipedia. AKRadecki^Speaketh 19:47, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment "What if it had been notable" is a new argument, at least to me. Offers infinite possibilities...DGG 03:12, 7 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - per nom. Not sure if I would want a list of (ex.) "Aviation Incidents - Engine Fires" other than ones resulting in loss of life or aircraft (I think a comprehensive list would be thousands of entries, and essentially trivia.) Even near-misses are problematic for a list (again, a shockingly large number occur, and formal reports issued on, every year). Regarding what *might* have happened, I don't think that is relevant. Factual content about catastrophic pylon failure is best kept in articles such as El Al Flight 1862, or the similar China Airlines 747 cargo crash in 1991. Lipsticked Pig 19:52, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete As serious as such incidents are with strong potential for catastrophic structural failure, loss of hydraulics, electrics or fuel lines, etc etc, the fact of the matter is that this did not develop into anything that we don't see time and time again on airliners; there really is too many of these to cover encyclopaedically. There must be one or two of these every week worldwide - more. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 20:52, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, there was talk of a standard for air accidents and incidents a while back that showed there wasn't even consensus for including all scheduled commercial flight accidents with fatalities, let alone minor incidents such as this. Sure, it could've been worse, but so could lots of things. --Dhartung | Talk 21:27, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Can you provide a link to said discusion - not for any practicle purpose, just to satisfy my couriousity. The only discusion on the matter I've ever seen is four AfDs where it was decided a crash with fatalities is automatically notable - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mohawk Airlines Flight 411, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mohawk Airlines Flight 405, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/1963 Rochester air crash and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Airwork Flight 23. Now I'm at it, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Air West Flight 612 is relevant, tto, as an example of a nonfatal article being kept. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 06:39, 7 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete This extremely minor incident is not that unusual. Wikipedia doesn't have a written policy regarding aviation accidents and incidents, but there is precedent that accidents causing major loss of life (the number depends on the year), terrorist attacks or hijackings, the first accident of an aircraft type or design (say, the first accident involving a turboprop engine worldwide), or any accident that causes a major change in the way the airlines do business (e.g. causes them to sell off an aircraft type en masse or almost puts a major airline out of business) are notable. As it stands, this extremely minor incident (do you *know* how many engines catch fire every week in the US alone, let alone worldwide??) is not notable. --Charlene 21:34, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge to United Airlines. 132.205.44.134 23:07, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry - way not-notable enough for a general airline overview article. AKRadecki^Speaketh 23:32, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Concur. This is Just not a notable enough incident to mention in either the airline or airliner articles. - BillCJ 23:43, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• this is "noticeable" partly because of the final paragraph in the article. it may not be the most disastrous of accident, but it has a high visibility due to its high profile route -- two most important capitals in the world, with a lot of high-profile people flying on this route regularly, i think the engine fire is very noticeable. also, somebody said engine fires happen all the time ("every week") -- is that actually true? i mean, do planes burn and dump their fuel all the time? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.103.11.211 (talk • contribs)
  • First, it's "notable", not "noticeable". I'm not being picky, it's actually important around here. Second, the route is irrelevent. United Airlines is a general overview article, and only the most significant accidents get mentioned there. Third, dumping fuel is standard practice for an emergency air turnback, to get the plane light enough for landing. It's a precaution that is part of the standard operational practices. Mechanical failures may not happen every day, but they are certainly frequent. AKRadecki^Speaketh 01:01, 7 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: It is not apparent from the cited news articles that this was an uncontained engine failure; consequently there may not even be an official NTSB investigation Lipsticked Pig 01:06, 7 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good point - I did a query of the NTSB database], using all of 2007 and United as search parameters and nothing on this flight came up. This makes it even less notable. It might well have only warranted a Mechanical Interuption Summary to the FAA. AKRadecki^Speaketh 01:15, 7 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• I started this entry precisely because it was very notable. How many engine fires get reported on the Washington Post, USA Today, BBC, China's official news agency Xinhua [1], multiple national papers and publications in greater China? (just a few Chinese references here) [2] [3] [4] This may not be a serious aviation incident, but it's a very notable public incident. And for an airline that tried so hard to lobby for a route like this by setting up huge campaigns and made it one of its most high-profile flights, a fire like this is certainly notable. I think this is something that people would want to read about when they check on United Airlines. A lot of these arguments here make perfect sense to me, but people are all using their own standards in judging it, i.e., agreed-upon guidelines are necessary.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Sinmiedoanada (talk • contribs)

Since this discussion is going to be referenced later in notability discussions, I'd like to point out that the reason the notability standards require multiple non-trivial secondary sources is because it is assumed that they will take place over time. When multiple sources occur on the same day, and then the incident is quickly forgotten (meaning it's not mentioned again in the media), that doesn't confer the same kind of notability. The fact that there aren't follow up reports indicates a lack of notability. As to the Chinese reports you've mentioned, one of them even says "Aviation officials said while such incident doesn't occur often, it's not uncommon that a jet will lose an engine in flight." None of the reports say the aircraft caught on fire, just that the tower reported seeing flames coming out of the back of the engine. This, thus, isn't even a real engine fire. What happened is nothing more than a technical malfunction that got blown way out of proportion by the media. Media sensationalism, based on technical ignorance by reporters compounded by the ability of wire services to instantly transmit a story around the world, does not connote true notability. The point I'm making here, for the record, is that there's a difference between mulitple media reports that happen all at once, which are essentially mirrors of each other, and on-going media coverage. The endurance of the coverage is the true source of the notability. AKRadecki^Speaketh 00:41, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We've been working up to starting guidlines recently, and we've begun discusing what they should be today - please go here to contribute to the discusion. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 18:54, 7 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. Engine fires happen. If we start having an article on each one, this is no longer an encyclopedia. The event needs to be notable. For airlines and aircraft that is generally considered to be someone killed, major aircraft damage or at least many significant injuries. Vegaswikian 23:02, 9 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.