QANTAS last night grounded its fleet of six A380s after an engine on flight QF32 leaving Singapore was ripped apart by an explosion.
The incident could have implications for the worldwide fleet of super-jumbos.
The airline was last night scrambling to find additional aircraft to carry passengers who were on the stricken super-jumbo and could not say when it would reinstate the A380 jets.
Parts of the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine ripped through the A380's wing, Qantas's first aircraft named after aviator Nancy-Bird Walton, while others fell to the ground over the Indonesian island of Batam. Pieces of debris, the largest a hatch or hold door, fell on 12 locations in the city including the roof of an elementary school, where watching students narrowly escaped injury.
The engine explosion was the first in an A380 since they came into service in 2007.
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The aircraft was six minutes into the flight to Sydney and at 6000ft on the critical, high-energy climb when the engine came apart.
Three senior captains on the flight found themselves deluged with 54 error messages as the plane's sophisticated computers registered the extent of the damage to the aircraft.
Witnesses on the ground near Batam, on the Indonesian island of the same name, initially thought the aircraft had exploded and said they saw flames and smoke.
Batam city resident Rusdi told MetroTV: "I heard a big explosion . . . and saw a commercial passenger plane flying low in the distance with smoke on one of its wings."
An administrative staffer at State Elementary School No 7 said shards of metal fell from the aircraft "like rain".
"We heard an explosion and students and teachers ran outside where we saw the plane circling," said principal Sarifah Masnawati.
"We got all the children back into the school because there were pieces of metal falling in the grounds, the biggest one or two kilos.
"Thank God there were no victims."
Indonesian aviation authorities downplayed suggestions that volcanic ash from the Mount Merapi eruptions played any part in causing the incident.
Passengers on the A380 described an explosion followed by a loud bang and a rattling of the cabin.
Christopher Lee, one of the 440 passengers on board the A380, told ABC's PM program last night: "Some of the passengers then alerted cabin staff to the fact that there was an explosion, there was smoke or something to that effect. At that (point), we were still on take-off, the seatbelt signs were still on, the cabin staff came to inspect very quickly and then obviously alerted the captain."
Mr Lee said the landing in Singapore was not too bad. "I must say, I fly on many international flights and probably do, if not one a week, sometimes two a week, and it's one of the smoothest landings I've had actually," he said.
Another passenger, Ulf Waschbusch, told journalists there was a boom and "a little bit of fire".
"Something ruptured the left wing; it was a small rupture," the Singapore-based technology executive said. "Everyone was surprisingly calm on the plane. We were not going crazy at all."
He said people laughed when several babies began crying simultaneously amid the eerie calm after the explosion. "The crew helped tremendously. I felt in good hands. Qantas did a great job in keeping us safe."
The flight crew issued a PAN-PAN, one step down from a mayday, and requesting a priority rather than emergency landing, and began circling to dump fuel to reduce the aircraft's weight.
The plane landed safely at 11.46am (2.46pm AEDT) but damage in the wiring meant engineers were initially unable to get near the damaged engine.
About five hours later, the passengers were escorted through a cordon of steel barricades from the baggage hall to a fleet of waiting coaches and taken to Singapore hotels. They appeared to have been briefed not to stop and talk to the media, and were rushed through by airport security, but some shared a few words. "Frightening," said one woman. Another spoke of an explosion. A third said: "We're all good. We're all good."
The pilots, escorted out next, and the cabin crew looked straight ahead and remained silent.
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said the airline was working through the causes of the incident to make sure there were no problems on other A380s. "Obviously, Rolls-Royce and Airbus are heavily involved in this," Mr Joyce said. "They need to give us advice as well and their view of what the reason is. They're immediately working on it."
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau would also be involved and Qantas was doing its own risk assessment. "It could take days for it to be resolved but what we're going to do is take the . . . time until we're comfortable that we fully understand this before we put the fleet back in the air," Mr Joyce said.
Singapore Airlines said last night it would continue flying its 11 A380s, but Mr Joyce said the explosion was an issue for all operators of the aircraft. He said there was no evidence the engine had ingested anything and initial speculation was that there was a mechanical failure in the engine.
"This is an aircraft that is relatively new, this aircraft is only two years of age, these engines are new engines," he said. "So this is not a maintenance issue, this is actually an issue with the manufacture of the aircraft or the engines."
Mr Joyce said Qantas teams were working through the problem of what to do with A380 passengers. In addition to the Singapore plane, three of the A380s will be grounded in Los Angeles, one in Sydney and one in Frankfurt.
"Obviously, we do have spare capability and 747s that we can operate and we'll be . . . looking at any ways we can hire an aircraft if we need to," Mr Joyce said.
Peter Marosszeky, a senior visiting fellow of the University of NSW's department of aviation, said photographs of the plane suggested a massive internal failure of the engine, possibly a gas generator, turbine or bearing. "This type of incident has been seen previously, but it was a long time ago and with much older planes than the A380," he said.
Mr Joyce said the flight and cabin crew had done "a fantastic job" handling the incident, adding that Qantas still had a lower rate of engine failures than the rest of the industry, despite the latest failure and another on a Boeing 747.
The ATSB's Ian Sangston said a team of four investigators was heading to Singapore last night. The flight data and cockpit voice recorders had been quarantined and a protection order had been put on various parts of the aircraft.
"We've already established a liaison with our Indonesian and Singaporean colleagues to the extent that the Indonesians are assisting with the items that reportedly fell to (the) ground," Mr Sangston said.
Qantas engineers seized on the incident to question the airline's safety.
(source:theaustralian.com.au
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