BBCSecond Qantas jet in engine scare
A Qantas airline jumbo jet has made an emergency landing in Singapore because of an engine problem.
The Boeing 747-400 turned back shortly after take-off from Changi Airport, airline officials said.
It comes a day after a Qantas Airbus A380 was forced to make an emergency landing at the same airport after one of its engines exploded.
Qantas grounded its six-strong fleet of A380s and an investigation is under way into what caused the blowout.
The latest incident affected Sydney-bound flight QF6, which was carrying more than 400 passengers.
"Shortly after take-off the captain experienced an issue with one of its engines," a Qantas spokeswoman said.
The plane managed to land safely, she said.
One of the passengers, Australian Ranjan Sivagnanasundaram, told Reuters news agency: "Around 20 minutes into the flight we heard a loud bang and the pilot asked the passengers to put our heads into brace position.
"It was a very big shock to us, especially after what happened yesterday."
Another, Andrew Jenkins, from the UK, described "a loud bang and a jet of fire from the back of the engine", the Associated Press reported.
Earlier, Qantas said the engine failure on its flagship A380 may have been caused by a design fault or "material failure".
CEO Alan Joyce said it was "an engine issue" and not one of maintenance on the two-year-old plane.
Rolls-Royce, the British firm which makes the Trent 900 engine involved, said it was checking all the A380s in service.
The engine blew up over western Indonesia, sending debris falling on to the island of Batam and leaving a trail of smoke.
Passengers were put on a relief flight to Australia early on Friday.
Qantas points the finger at Rolls Royce for the first engine explosion:
Brisbane TimesDesign flaw is the likely cause of midair explosion, says Qantas
QANTAS has conceded that a design flaw in a Rolls-Royce engine is a likely reason for a midair explosion on its A380 superjumbo, but it expects the fleet to be back in service within ''days, not weeks''.
Amid concern about Rolls-Royce engines on the A380 and other aircraft, Qantas played down airworthiness directives from European regulators about excessive wear on the superjumbo's Trent 900 engines.
As investigators arrived in Singapore to begin an inquiry that could take a year, the 440 passengers from QF32 arrived in Sydney last night after their midair drama on Thursday. Qantas hoped the other five of its six A380s could be back in service within days, provided they passed checks to be carried out by tomorrow.
Advertisement: Story continues below Despite Qantas's grounding of the fleet on advice from Rolls-Royce, Lufthansa's superjumbos kept flying and Singapore Airlines resumed flights after it conducted precautionary checks in less than a day on its A380s.
The chief executive of Qantas, Alan Joyce, said he would not take short cuts on the airline's safety reputation so had acted on the Rolls-Royce advice. Asked if this meant Singapore Airlines was taking short cuts, he said: ''No, I'm only talking about Qantas's operations.''
Singapore Airlines, whose A380s ply the Australia-Singapore route, said ''as far as we are concerned we have adhered to the advice from Rolls-Royce''.
Europe's air safety watchdog issued an alert in August about abnormal wear inside the Trent 900 engines installed on the A380s.
It also released an airworthiness directive on January 29 warning of abnormal levels of wear to the engine during standard operation.
It raised the possibility of ''loss of engine performance with potential for inflight shutdown, oil migration and oil fire''.
Mr Joyce said Qantas had acted on airworthiness directives from European authorities, which was a ''standard practice that we do on a day-to-day basis''. His comments were supported even by the aircraft engineers' union, which has used the drama to attack Qantas's approach to maintenance.
Mr Joyce did concede that the emergency was ''most likely a material failure or some sort of design issue''.
The A380 was forced to make an emergency landing soon after takeoff from Changi Airport in Singapore with a large piece of its second engine missing and a punctured wing.
Rolls-Royce, the second-largest maker of jet engines, faces a wave of concern about its latest models. In at least two cases in the past year, two A380s with Trent 900s had been forced to land after an engine failure, The New York Times reported. In August, a Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 test engine developed for Boeing had blown up during a ground test.
A former airline executive who declined to be named said it was worrying that substantial problems were found on an aircraft that was little more than two years old. It is the second serious explosion involving a Rolls-Royce engine on a Qantas aircraft in less than three months. An engine exploded on a Qantas 747-400 between San Francisco and Sydney on August 30.
Facing reporters yesterday, Mr Joyce was asked why the airline had not also grounded the 747 fleet. He said: ''The difference was the unconstrained failure in the 747 did not involve the high velocity that this engine did … the pieces of metal going into the fuselage - that made this a significant engine compared to that in San Francisco.''
The federal president of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, Paul Cousins, said the excessive wear cited by the European watchdog had occurred in the turbine area, roughly near the damage sustained by the QF32's engine.
''These moving parts are wearing and if they get to a point where there's excessive wear there could be a breakdown,'' he said.
''If they've raised it as an [airworthiness directive], then they are concerned that it would cause a malfunction of the engine.''
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau's head of aviation safety, Ian Sangston, said ''a number of abnormal engine indications'' had started on the second engine about four minutes after the plane took off.
Australian and Singaporean investigators were examining the damage and Indonesian authorities were arranging for the retrieval of debris that landed on Batam Island. A Senate inquiry into air safety has been launched by the independent senator Nick Xenophon. He is particularly concerned about overseas maintenance of aircraft, including the A380. The inquiry has received a submission from the Australian and International Pilots Association.
While an engineering union points the finger at Qantus for outsourcing vital aircraft maintenance to second/third parties:
ArabianSupplyChain.comUnion blames outsourcing for Qantas problems
The head of an Australian engineering union has made a direct link between the increase in incidents on Qantas planes and the increase in outsourcing of maintenance work.
Steve Purvinas, federal secretary of Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA), spoke after Thursday’s engine blowout on a Qantas A380 that had just departed Singapore.
“We know that the dramatic increase in the number of safety incidents involving Qantas jets coincides with an increase in the amount of [maintenance] work that is no longer carried out in-house,” he said in a statement.
In comments attributed to APP, he expanded further: “We have seen some pretty horrid results of maintenance from the overseas facilities – things that aren’t reported in the press.
“A bigger [incident] we have seen of late is, last year they had three engines on a 747 that weren’t bolted correctly to the wings and they flew ... this aircraft for a month or so after a maintenance check in Hong Kong.”
Another theory was that these two Qatus aircraft flew through volcanic ash while passing over Indonesia, while there is another wackier theory of the CIA trying to trash Airbus to protect Boeing (like they supposedly trashed BP).
