Jet Engine Failure Causes Worry on Manufacturer

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)

Qantas grounds A380s after engine blast

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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GALLERY: Qantas mid-air scare

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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