Eighteen People Seeking Unspecified Damages From The Carrier, Other Defendants

A lawsuit has been filed against Boeing, GE and American Airlines after the airplane they were aboard suffered an uncontained engine failure and caught fire at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago last month.

The suit was filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, according to the Sun-Times Media Wire. The claimants say that GE sold a faulty engine to Boeing which the planemaker used to assemble an unsafe airplane. They further say that American Airlines employees should have been more thorough in inspecting the plane, and that they did not provide "assistance, supervision and instruction" to the passengers during the evacuation.

Twenty people were briefly hospitalized after the incident, and at no time did the fire enter the cabin of the Boeing 767.

The plane was on its takeoff roll when the uncontained engine failure occurred. One piece of the engine was found at a UPS warehouse facility more than a half-mile away from the runway, according to the NTSB's preliminary report.

(NTSB images)

FMI: www.ntsb.gov