Comment by jacquesm

Phase of flight is a major contributor to accident statistics with take-off and landing much more often associated with accidents than the rest of the flight.

Take-off asks a lot from the engines, and one nasty bit about manufacturing defects is that they can take a while to show up, but the bulk of them usually surfaces when the aircraft are relatively new.

But: this plane was delayed before the flight due to maintenance on engine #1, so that's the first place where I would start looking for issues without any kind of judgment beforehand on what you would expect to find. And that's the main issue with that comment, it assumes a conclusion, that's not how these investigations work because then you might miss the actual cause. And given how critical these machines are it doesn't take much. All it takes is a single, tiny mistake.

The really bad luck here is that it seems as though the failure of engine #1 took the center engine right along with it. That's one of the issues with that particular design, if you have debris from one of the forward engines it could easily get ingested by the rear mounted one.