A curse upon the engineer who didn’t understand real-life printed circuit card manufacturing and who didn’t do the power dissipation calculations correctly. In my aerospace days, I learned there is no substitute for walking the factory floor and visiting suppliers to learn how things are in real life.
I’ll also bet that it would be cheaper to remove the PC Card, the 2 connectors, 3 wires in the harness, and upgrade the switch to a oscillator. The result would be a variable speed fan. (A similar switch is already used other places, e.g. instrument panel lights.)
/rant