Why Did a New Qantas A380 Suffer a Flaming Engine Failure?

News Flash! Qantas grounded its fleet of six Airbus A380s today after one of the airline's Superjumbos experienced a flaming engine failure while flying over Indonesia. After the incident, the plane landed safely in Singapore.

Telstar Logistics Senior Air Travel Industry Analyst Brett Snyder thinks there's more to this story than meets the eye. (And given the ugliness of the photos above, that's really saying something.) Brett writes:

An engine failure in itself isn’t usually a major issue. The A380 has four engines, but even twin-engine aircraft are designed to be able to fly safely to an alternate airport on a single engine. In this case, the A380 had three engines left. No big deal, right?

It’s more serious in that it was an uncontained engine failure. A contained failure means that no parts of the engine left the engine casing. But this was an uncontained failure with debris falling to the ground and potentially damaging the airplane along the way. That makes it far more serious. [...]

My guess is that there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. Maybe Qantas has seen some issues around the engines before and this was the last straw. Maybe there was greater damage to the airplane than is being released to the public at this point. There are a lot of ways to speculate here, but in general, having an engine failure after three years in service is not enough to instantly ground the fleet.

UPDATE: 4 November, 10:15 pm Pacific

Not surprisingly, Brett Snyder got it right. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce now says something is seriously wrong with the deisgn of the A380s Rolls-Royce engines, and it's not Qantas's fault:

"This is an engine issue and the engines have been maintained by Rolls-Royce since they were installed on the aircraft," Joyce said. "We believe this is probably most likely a material failure or some type of design issue. We don't believe this is related to maintenance in any way."

Graphic: National Post

Comments

[asad]

If what the Rain Man said is still true, Qantas has an impeccable safety record and wants to maintain at least an image of being very safety-conscious. Grounding the fleet of A380s could very well be a PR move just as much as (or more than) a safety move.

I could imagine the outcry if they had continued flying them without having a (public) explanation of what caused the failure...

[Charles]

This might be an overabundance of caution. My understanding is that Qantas has never had a plane crash, ever. That is either an enviable safety record, or an airline that hardly has any planes.

[Stilgherrian]

My Crikey colleague Ben Sandilands has pointed to a recent airworthiness directive for the Trent 900 engines used on Qantas' A380s that mentioned the potential for an uncontained engine failure.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2010/11/04/what-happens-next-in-the-qantas-a380-incident/

Also, it's not that Qantas has never had a plane crash. It's that they've never had a crash that resulted in a fatality. This is still true. Their safety record was indeed enviable, but it came from their past practice of putting a very strong focus on maintenance, safety and reliability. It's a long way between airports in this part of the world.

[striatic]

Good news for Boeing, anyway.

[Joey]

@ Charles
Qantas is Australias national Carrier and has from their website:

6 x Airbus A380-800
6 x Boeing 747-400ER
20 x Boeing 747-400
26 x Boeing 767-300ER
41 x Boeing 737-800
21 x Boeing 737-400
11 x Boeing 717-200
10 x Airbus A330-300
7 x Airbus A330-200
21 x Bombardier Dash 8 (200/Q300)
21 x Bombardier Dash 8 (Q400)

Jetstar

51 x Airbus A320-200*
6 x Airbus A321-200
7 x Airbus A330-200

I'd hardly call that a Small fleet ;)

[Account Deleted]

Accidents do not happen by chance. So, this case calls a deep investigation.

[Snoopy]

Second uncontained engine failure on Qantas A/C in as many months. The last was 8/31/10 departing KSFO. Same outcome - no pax injured.

That said, whether or not passengers are injured by the initial failure of turbine components is purely a matter of luck. When high speed, rotating parts fail and ejected from the casing by centrifugal forces, which direction they exit the engine casing is purely a matter of chance.

Engineering of these machines is intentended to CONTAIN the failure in all but the most extreme situations - - - once you go uncontained, you've departed the realm of engineered outcomes.

Small bits of metal penetrating the passenger cabin or wings full of fuel - at high velocity - have the opportunity for serious catastrophe.

We can all remain cool and calm and applaud the crew and designers for building an A/C capable of flying on three engines, but, the fact that no one was injured in this, or the previous Qantas UEF involved considerable amounts of pure luck.