A Cracked Compressor Blade Set a WestJet Dash 8 Engine on Fire. Canada’s TSB Has Logged 13 Events on This Rotor.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada released its final report on September 22, 2026 into a WestJet Encore Dash 8-400 whose No. 2 engine surged and caught fire in the climb. A single rotor blade, cracked from the inside out, started it.

The aircraft, a Bombardier DHC-8-402 registered C-GVEN, was operating flight WEN3532 from Kamloops to Calgary on March 2, 2023, with four crew and 74 passengers aboard.

Twelve minutes after departure the crew heard a loud bang. The aircraft was at 25,000 feet, about 42 nautical miles north-northeast of Kelowna, and the No. 2 engine’s second-stage low-pressure compressor rotor had just failed.

The crew shut the engine down, declared an emergency and diverted to Kelowna International. The TSB records that the aircraft landed safely and there were no injuries.

How a Broken Blade Becomes a Fire

The fire was not caused by the broken blade directly. According to the TSB, the blade fracture surged the engine, and the engine control system responded to the power loss by increasing fuel flow to try to recover it.

That left a fuel-rich mixture venting into the exhaust duct, where it burned. The fire detection system triggered on the heat, and hot exhaust gas was re-ingested by the engine.

Examination found the blade had failed by high-cycle fatigue from a crack that started below the surface, roughly five thousandths of an inch under the pressure side, and no metallurgical anomaly at the initiation point. A second blade on the same rotor was cracked in a matching spot.

The Problem Is a Speed, Not a Part

The interesting part of this report is what puts the crack there. Pratt & Whitney Canada’s investigation, with TSB laboratory oversight, traced the fatigue to a mechanical resonance the rotor enters at a specific shaft speed: 26,000 rpm, give or take 50.

Every rotating assembly has frequencies at which it flexes far more than the input would suggest. Hold one there and the blade accumulates fatigue cycles at a rate that has nothing to do with thrust setting or hours flown.

What pushes the engine into that band is an ordinary cockpit selection, on a turboprop airlines still fly precisely because it is cheap to operate. The report states that using the BLEED MIN setting in climb and cruise raises low-pressure compressor speed, and that this can leave the engine dwelling in the 26,000 rpm window.

Cold makes it worse. Below about minus 13°F (minus 25°C), the manufacturer found resonance stresses at the crack site multiply by 2.5, and roughly 30 minutes of cumulative exposure is enough to matter.

That is also why the answer has been inspections and software rather than a new blade. AeroCorner covered a separate Dash 8-400 wing tank directive earlier this month, and the pattern is the same: find it, then change how the aircraft is flown or managed.

Thirteen Events, and What Was Done

The report’s own table lists 13 second-stage rotor events on the PW150A, seven involving Canadian operators and six foreign. They run from a Flybe failure in October 2012 to a Widerøe blade fracture in June 2025.

Not all 13 share this cause. The TSB logs the three earliest foreign events as soft foreign object damage, so the table is a record of how often this rotor has shed a blade, not a count of resonance failures.

The software change is the quiet fix. Rewriting the fuel flow limit schedule attacks the part of the sequence that turned a compressor failure into a fire, which is the step that made this occurrence more than an engine shutdown.

The TSB also recorded that the WEN3532 crew followed standard operating procedures and checklists, and credited their crew resource management with the outcome. De Havilland’s corrective work with Pratt & Whitney Canada was still continuing when the report was written.