Originally Posted by
compressor stall
For various reason Airbus / BEA / GE really wanted this found.
They were doing magnetometer scans.
I would assume that since this was pretty clearly an engine failure, GE would be picking up the tab - if not all, at least the lions share. That's pretty standard procedure - when the cargo door blew out of the United 747 near Hawaii, Boeing spent a boatload of cash to find and recover the door so they could find out what went wrong and make sure it didn't happen again.
For design purposes, we assumed the probability of an uncontained engine failure (typically a rotor burst) at 10-8/hr, the current regulatory guidance requires a "one in twenty" analysis for rotor bursts - meaning the analysis needs to show that the probability of a rotor burst resulting in a catastrophic accident should be 5% or less.
However the engine company designs the rotors - especially the fan disc - to never fail. So, just like Sioux City, it's critically important to find out why it did fail so they can take appropriate action to prevent a future event.
BTW, IIRC, they traced the Sioux City fan disc failure to a flaw in the source material used to make the disc. There were nine other fan discs made from that same batch of material, which were promptly removed from service.