Krismiler: [Quote] One of those blowers caused an inflight breakup on 22 September 1966 when it failed and caused a fire which led to the port wing separating. [/QUOTE]
‘’That was Ansett - ANA flight 149.
In my days at Ansett this was still spoken about in lowered tones. There were two problems with the design. The main one being the “pancake” accessory gearbox was the wrong side of the firewall. From memory it mounted the dunlop aviation roots blower, a generator for aircraft power and an alternator for electric deicing power.
The second one (as I was told, but I don’t think was mentioned as the cause) was that the stack of thrust washers on the blower shafts were out of order - the order in the manual was ambiguous and not being designed to make assembly foolproof, and the resultant failure cascaded. A young Roy Perry was superintendent of component overhaul in my day and I was told his father had been superintendent at the time of the accident. I was told that his hair went white over the next few months from the strain and awful conclusion about the cause.