Oil leaks found in engines of grounded Airbus A380s

Emergency landing: the Qantas A380 in Singapore last week
12 April 2012

Tests have uncovered oil leaks in three Rolls-Royce engines on Qantas's grounded Airbus A380s, as engineers try to find the cause of an engine failure on board one of the carrier's jets.

Australia's national airline grounded its six double-decker A380s, the world's newest and largest superjumbo, after an engine broke minutes into a flight from Singapore to Sydney last week, scattering debris over Indonesia's Batam island. The plane made an emergency landing in Singapore.

Engineers conducted eight hours of checks on each engine over the weekend and Qantas chief executive officer Alan Joyce said there were oil leaks in the turbine area of three engines on three planes.

"The oil leaks were beyond normal tolerances," Mr Joyce said. "So Rolls-Royce and our engineers have looked at what we have gathered as an accepted level and they have passed that threshold.

"All of these engines are new engines on a new aircraft type. The engines are not performing to the parameters that you would expect with this."

Qantas grounded all of its A380s for an extra 72 hours. All three affected engines have been removed from the planes for further testing.

Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, the other airlines that fly A380s fitted with Rolls-Royce's Trent 900 engines, also grounded their planes last week but resumed services after completing checks.

The Qantas engineers are working with Rolls-Royce, who manufactured and maintains the engines, as well as Airbus.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading an international investigation into the blow-out on the A380, appealed for help from residents of Batam island to find the missing chunk of a turbine disc. It released a photograph of a jagged and bent piece of turbine disc from the Trent 900 engine and asked that anyone who might have found a similar piece should hand it to police.

It said one piece of the shattered engine that had been found on Batam was being sent to Britain for examination by Rolls-Royce engineers, under the supervision of bureau investigators. Extra experts were being sent from Australia to Singapore to examine other debris.

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