Engine failure on Qantas may be due to faulty part

A FAULTY part or design issue may have caused the severe damage to an engine that forced a Qantas Airways Airbus A380 to make an emergency landing in Singapore, Qantas’s boss said yesterday.

Separately, a European Union air safety body confirmed it told airlines in August to make checks after finding “wear, beyond engine manual limits” on the type of Rolls-Royce engines fitted to the Qantas jet and some other A380s.

And less than 48 hours after the A380 incident, a Qantas Boeing 747 flying the same Sydney route returned to Singapore, also as a result of engine trouble.

The A380 engine failure on Thursday, which scattered debris over an Indonesian island, was the biggest incident to date for the world’s largest passenger plane, in service only since 2007.

The incident saw Qantas ground its fleet of six A380s pending safety checks which will take 24-48 hours, and led other airlines to check their own A380s. All A380s have four engines.

“We believe this is probably most likely a material failure or some sort of design issue,” Alam Joyce told a news conference in Sydney. “If we don’t find any adverse findings in those checks the aircraft will resume operations..”

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said there was no indication foul play had contributed to the incident.

Singapore Airlines resumed flying its A380s yesterday, lifting a grounding order imposed after the Qantas incident.

Singapore’s clearance of its 11 A380s — the second largest fleet after Emirates — will be a relief for European planemaker Airbus and British enginemaker Rolls-Royce, which lost over $1.5 billion (€1.06bn) in combined market value on Thursday.

German airline Lufthansa said it had withdrawn an A380 from a Frankfurt-Johannesburg flight because it had not had enough time to check the engines before departure.

One passenger aboard flight QF32 reported hearing a “massive bang” while photographs of the engine showed its outer, rear casing had been torn apart.

Cuban plane crash kills 68

ALL 68 people on board a Cuban Aero Caribbean passenger plane were killed, including 28 foreigners, when it crashed in a central province on Thursday after issuing an emergency call, authorities said yesterday.

The state-run Aerocaribbean aircraft had been flying from the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba to Havana. The pilot reported an emergency before contact was lost.