Qantas Airways chief executive Alan Joyce has said an engine failure on an A380 superjumbo should be blamed on the engine’s design and had nothing to do with the airline’s operations.
A mid-flight failure of one of Rolls-Royce PLC’s Trent 900 engines on Nov. 4 forced Qantas to ground its six-plane A380 fleet. On Saturday, the airline resumed some A380 operations, but four of the planes remain grounded.
Joyce told the Australian Broadcasting Corp in an interview that broadcast yesterday that his airline performed “exceptionally well” over the incident, which forced an A380 with 459 on board to make an emergency landing in Singapore.
“It was a new engine and it was absolutely clear [the engine failure had] nothing to do with anything Qantas was doing,” Joyce told Inside Business in a recorded interview. “It was an engine that didn’t perform to the parameters that we would’ve expected.”
Although he admitted the bill was “still mounting,” he said that Qantas’ handling of the incident had probably enhanced its brand rather than damaged it.
“In the research we’re doing, people are aware that this was a Rolls-Royce problem, so that when we survey the general population the vast majority of people know that there’s a problem with the design of the engines,” he said.
Joyce dismissed several other incidents involving turn-backs of Qantas planes since Nov. 4 as minor in global aviation terms, saying there were “hundreds of them that take place every year.”
“It’s how you handle them and how you manage them,” he said. “And each one of these when I look at them I can see that Qantas performed exceptionally well in how it managed them.”
Safety remained the airline’s top priority, he said.
Joyce said that Qantas was maintaining some restrictions on its A380s and they would not yet be operating across the Pacific to Los Angeles.
The decision not to operate the A380s across the Pacific had been taken in consultation with Rolls-Royce and Airbus SAS, Joyce said, as the engines needed to be operated at a higher power setting for longer distances on that route.
“We introduce the aircraft to make sure that we understand how the engines are performing before we put them back on LA,” he said.
The Nov. 4 incident was the most serious so far for the world’s largest passenger aircraft. It hit shares in Qantas, Airbus parent European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company NV and Rolls-Royce.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last