Qantas Airways, Australia’s largest carrier, juggled aircraft to maintain schedules after a second engine flameout in as many days, as it continues safety checks of its grounded Airbus SAS A380 fleet.
Today’s Sydney-London flight, normally an A380 plane, will begin on an “alternative aircraft” for the first leg to Singapore and a British Airways jetliner will complete the journey, Qantas said in a statement. A 747’s return to Singapore yesterday after an engine failure was “unrelated” to the engine explosion on an A380 a day earlier, spokeswoman Olivia Wirth said by phone today.
Qantas is working with Rolls-Royce Group to check its six grounded A380s, which represent about 17 per cent of its international capacity, before deciding whether to return them to service. The airline has been using some of its 27 Boeing jumbo jets to replace those Airbus planes. “It was like the afterburner of a fighter jet,” said Andrew Jenkins, 43, a passenger who is based in London and was flying to Sydney on the 747 yesterday for work. “The captain explained that the problem was contained. He shut the engine down and it didn’t look like anything beyond that.”
The pilot of the Boeing jet, which departed Singapore as flight QF6 bound for Sydney yesterday with 412 passengers on board, shut down one engine after flames erupted shortly after takeoff, dumped fuel and flew for about an hour before landing, Wirth said. Engineers are inspecting the plane.
Qantas flight QF32, an A380 carrying 466 passengers and crew, returned to Singapore for an emergency landing on November 4 after one of its Trent 900 engines blew out.
“Entirely unrelated”
While both problems involved Rolls-Royce engines, the incidents were “entirely unrelated” and they were serviced by different shops in Australia and Germany, Wirth said. No passengers from QF32 were on yesterday’s 747 flight, she said.
A spokesman at the Rolls-Royce civil aerospace business in Derby, England, said he couldn’t immediately comment.
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Anaita Talkhan, 40, a Sydney resident and passenger on the 747, said flight attendants told everyone to get into emergency landing positions.
“There was a quick flash of light and I could hear ‘brace, brace, brace’ from one side and ‘head down, head down, head down,’ from the other,” she said. “After that the captain came on line and asked everyone to stay calm. He said an engine had overheated and we have three perfectly good ones otherwise.”