Rolls-Royce on Friday blamed a single faulty part for last week’s Qantas engine explosion over Indonesia, and warned that the incident will hit its profits this year.
Shares in the British manufacturer rallied by more than 2 percent after it announced it had identified the component that caused the explosion. It is now starting a program to replace this part, so that airlines can bring grounded planes back into service.
Rolls-Royce also told the City of London that the incident means its profit growth for this year will be lower than expected.
Singapore Airlines recalled three Airbus A380s this week after discovering an oil leak on the engines.
A Qantas superjumbo fitted with a Rolls-Royce engine was forced into an emergency landing on Thursday last week when the engine blew up in mid-flight, and the Australian airline’s six Airbus A380s have been grounded since then.
Following checks, Rolls-Royce has concluded the problem only relates to the Trent 900 engines used in the superjumbos and that the “failure was confined to a specific component in the turbine area of the engine. This caused an oil fire, which led to the release of the intermediate pressure turbine disc.”
This means that 20 A380s in service that are fitted with the Trent 900 engines are affected.
The world’s second-largest maker of aeroengines said it would work with its airline customers over the next few days to replace the faulty component and bring the whole A380 fleet back into service.
“Safety is the highest priority of Rolls-Royce,” chief executive Sir John Rose said. “We have instigated a program of measures in collaboration with Airbus, our Trent 900 customers and the regulators. This will enable our customers progressively to bring the whole fleet back into service. We regret the disruption we have caused.”
Another mishap
Meanwhile, a Qantas Boeing 767 turned back on a domestic flight in Australia after pilots detected abnormal vibrations in one of the plane’s engines.
No one was injured in Friday’s incident.
Qantas spokesman Simon Rushton said the latest incident was not related to the A380 problem and that the landing was strictly a precaution.
He said the plane involved was a Boeing 767 fitted with two engines built by General Electric. It was carrying 234 people.
Rushton said the flight crew noticed vibrations in the left hand engine about five minutes into the flight from the western Australian city of Perth for Melbourne in the southeast. They decided to turn back after doing in-flight checks and landed safely in Perth.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees