When Hydraulic Hoses Fail: A Lesson from the FedEx Landing

In June 2025, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) published its final report on a FedEx Boeing 757 that made a hard landing in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The root cause? A ruptured hydraulic hose in the aircraft’s left main landing gear system.

According to the report, the hose had suffered fatigue failure—an invisible process that plays out slowly over time, eventually leading to a sudden and sometimes catastrophic break. The incident ended safely, but the lesson is clear: in high-pressure systems, small components often carry enormous responsibility.

While this failure happened in an aircraft, anyone working with hydraulic systems—in construction, mining, manufacturing, or logistics—should take note. The risks are universal.

Fatigue failure in hydraulic hoses isn’t dramatic at first. There are no flashing lights or alarms. It begins with minor internal stress—bending, vibration, temperature swings—and gradually wears down the hose’s structure from the inside out. In this case, the internal reinforcement layer, likely a braided wire structure, began to degrade. Eventually, the hose could no longer withstand the operating pressure, leaked fluid rapidly, and left the landing gear inoperable.

We’ve seen similar scenarios in ground-based systems, where fatigue goes unnoticed until the hose bursts—causing machinery shutdowns, halted job sites, or in worst cases, injury.

The causes tend to be the same: excessive bending, high-frequency vibration, prolonged exposure to heat or UV, and simply running hoses far beyond their intended service life. It doesn’t help that many operators think of hoses as disposable accessories, rather than as precision components critical to system safety.

One reason this incident resonates so strongly is that it mirrors a broader shift we’ve observed in the industry: companies are moving from price-driven decisions to reliability-driven ones.

At Senflow, we work with clients across Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. And we’re hearing the same thing from many of them: downtime is more expensive than ever, and reliability matters more than the initial price. There’s a growing awareness that cheap hoses with inconsistent crimping, questionable materials, or poor traceability often cost far more in the long run.

“I used to focus on price per meter. Now I ask, how many service calls does it cause per month?” – Distributor, South America

That shift in mindset is changing how hoses are sourced, tested, and tracked.

So how do you stay ahead of failures like this?

It starts with choosing hoses designed for high-cycle fatigue—products with proven reinforcement structures and stable rubber compounds. But even the best hose will fail early if it’s bent too tightly, twisted on installation, or used in the wrong temperature range. That’s why design, installation, and replacement scheduling all matter.

We always advise clients to think in terms of lifecycle cost, not just unit cost. A slightly more expensive hose that lasts twice as long isn’t more expensive—it’s smarter. And a hose that can be traced, batch-tested, and pressure-verified? That’s peace of mind for both the engineer and the operator.

What the FedEx case reminds us is this: failure doesn’t always come from neglect. Sometimes it comes from underestimating the quiet parts of a system—the ones that work, until they don’t.

For those of us in the fluid power industry, that means paying closer attention to the hoses we specify, supply, and install. Because whether you're landing a jet or running a backhoe, what you can’t see inside a hydraulic line can absolutely stop everything.

This article includes publicly available information from NTSB and NewsChannel9, processed and interpreted by Senflow for industry analysis purposes. All rights remain with the original publishers.