The blowout of an engine on Qantas Flight 32 on Thursday was the latest in a series of problems involving Rolls-Royce engines and analysts said it raised serious questions about the company’s ability to develop the engines for the newest generation of commercial and military airplanes. episode, involving a Qantas A380 jetliner carrying more than 450 people, was particularly alarming because it occurred on the world’s largest passenger plane and a flagship program for Airbus, a unit of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, or EADS.
Rolls-Royce of London, which is a separate company from the carmaker owned by BMW, is also developing an engine for Boeing’s latest aircraft, the 787 Dreamliner. Problems with that engine have contributed to the program’s delays.
“This is extremely worrying for Rolls-Royce,” said Phil Abbott, editor of Aircraft Engines, a London-based industry newsletter. “There is no such thing as a shoddy engine maker. But the moment engines fly to bits, no one wants to fly them anymore.”
The pressure on Rolls-Royce intensified on Friday when Qantas’s CEO, Alan Joyce, said the mid-air engine failure on Flight 32 may have been caused by material failure or a design problem with the engines. Mr. Joyce said it was still too early to determine a cause for the failure but he rejected concerns from a labor union that it may have been caused by insufficient maintenance, a responsibility of the airline.
“We believe this is probably, most likely, a material failure or some sort of design issue,” Mr. Joyce said at a news conference in Sydney, Australia. “We don’t believe this is related to maintenance in any way.”
Passengers from Flight 32 were being flown to Australia on Friday, and were expected to arrive in Sydney in the evening.
At his new conference, Mr. Joyce said Qantas, Airbus and Rolls-Royce were examining the engines on all of the airline’s A380s, a check expected to be completed this weekend. The airline’s fleet of six A380s remained grounded on Friday, but Mr. Joyce said that if no problems are found the A380s would resume flying, he said.
In at least two previous cases during the past year, two A380 airplanes with Trent 900 engines from Rolls-Royce were forced to land after an engine failure. In August, a Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 test engine developed for Boeing blew up during a ground test.
Rolls-Royce has also faced problems with its military engines, where it has teamed with General Electric to build an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Both companies are battling to keep the Pentagon from canceling the project. They disclosed in late September that one of their test engines had experienced an anomaly that damaged the airfoils. Pratt & Whitney has the main contract to build engines for the fighter, and the government sales could reach $100 billion over 25 years.
Modern engines are designed to contain a blowout inside the engine’s casing so that broken parts are not sprayed at high speed into the fuselage or the wings, where the fuel tanks are located. But in the case of Flight 32, parts of the engine were blown away and appeared to rupture the wing. An Airbus spokesman in France said it was the first uncontained engine failure and the most serious problem experienced by the A380 since it entered service in 2007.
The double-decker A380 airplanes fly with four engines, which are developed either by Rolls-Royce or Engine Alliance, a joint venture between G.E. and Pratt. All the engine failures on A380s have so far involved Roll-Royce engines, analysts said.
In a statement, the company said it was cooperating with investigators. “This is at a very early stage, and it would be inappropriate to draw any conclusions at this time.”
Robert W. Mann Jr., an aviation industry expert in Port Washington, N.Y., said that the concern with Flight 32 was that the debris was not contained by the engine casing. “An uncontained failure is the most serious because it causes collateral damage,” he said.
There are 37 A380s in service, 20 with the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine. Three airlines operate with the Trent 900: Qantas, which has six; Lufthansa, three; and Singapore Airlines, 11.
Emirates Airline, which operates 13 A380s, and Air France, which has four in service, use the GP7200 engine developed by the G.E.-Pratt joint venture.
Rolls-Royce’s problems also raise questions about the newest plane being developed by Airbus, the A350, made out of composite material and meant to compete with the 787 from Boeing. Unlike most aircraft programs — including the A380 and the 787, which are built with two engine options — the A350 will be configured with only one engine, the Rolls-Royce Trent XWB.
While the A380 program has not been a big commercial success for Airbus, the company has much more at stake with the A350. Airbus has 234 orders for the A380, but it already has 573 orders for the A350, which it expects to put into service in 2013.
“You design an aircraft around an engine, and the aircraft’s performance depends upon its engine,” said Richard L. Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal Group, a consulting firm in Fairfax, Va. “The real issue is Rolls-Royce’s reputation as a development company. They promised an awful lot with the A350. There is a lot riding on that engine and on that plane, whose performance is entirely dependent on Rolls-Royce.”
Airbus declined to comment about the impact of Thursday’s episode on the development of the A350.
One expert suggested on Thursday that Rolls-Royce might have stretched technological limits with its latest Trent engines in the race to provide better efficiency. “I think it is possible that one of the problems Rolls-Royce is experiencing over all is that they may have lost a little bit of margin in the design of their engines,” said Hans Weber, the president of Tecop International, an aviation consulting firm in San Diego. “We are pushing harder to the limits because we are forced to increase the efficiency.”
(source:nytimes.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment