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In the hours that followed the crash of a British Midland Airways Boeing 737-400 on Britain's M1 motorway, the airline industry harbored fears that the accident held terrible significance for the burgeoning business of flying twinjets for long distances over water. While the AAIB's special bulletin makes no attempt to determine the accident's cause, or to apportion blame, it details a sequence of events which could easily have occurred in mid-ocean, with equally disastrous results. The sequence begins with the failure of a fan blade in the 737's left engine, producing symptoms which the crew wrongly diagnosed as a problem with the right engine. Those symptoms included vibration, plus smoke and the smell of burning carried by the air conditioning in the cockpit. After examining systems recovered from the crashed aircraft, the AAIB is certain that the cockpit instruments correctly indicated severe vi- bration in the left engine.