As a result of this incident, Qantas has grounded its A380 fleet for two weeks, Singapore Airlines pulled all the Trent 900s from three A380s, and Lufthansa has changed one engine from one of its mastodon planes.
But there’s more than the problem that made the engine to blow up mid-flight. According to Jon Ostrander at Flight Global, “the failure in the number two engine was uncontained, as parts penetrated the wing”.
This happened because the engine is not designed to contain a failure on its entirety. Only the front part can contain the engine’s blades in the case of an explosion, but the rest of the casing is not designed to do so. According to the US National Transportation Safety Board, uncontained disk failure is “mitigated by designating disks as safety-critical parts, defined as the parts of an engine whose failure is likely to present a direct hazard to the aircraft”.
It seems that a) their safety design principle only looks good on paper, b) Rolls-Royce has not one but two problems in the Trent 900 engine and c) the passengers and crew got lucky. [Flight Global]
Richard Siu
Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:31 AMWow what a lame video, a picture would have suffice… you don’t need a 2:09 min video of a plane wing..
Was hoping for some kind of explosion or smoke or SOMETHING… how anti climatic…
Nodeity
Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 11:52 AMGotta agree with you there,.. the video ia complete waste of time. Untill they actually pin down what happened to the engine (and RR are looking pretty sheepish here) It’s all just hype :{
Tom
Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 12:26 PMThis whole post is about a week late!
Lame. Nothing new here. Move on
matt
Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 11:16 PMthis is a tech blog, they’re not interested in the “ooh my god!!! 500 people nearly died!!! panic!!!” that a normal news site, they are interested in what actually is going wrong, which takes a bit of time to come out…
“According to the US National Transportation Safety Board, uncontained disk failure is “mitigated by designating disks as safety-critical parts, defined as the parts of an engine whose failure is likely to present a direct hazard to the aircraft”.”
so… they have reduced the severity of the problem of uncontained disk failure by… putting a post-it on it saying “FYI: shits gonna hit the fan if this part goes wrong”
that seems like “increasing safety” at a nuclear reactor by putting up a sign saying “you’ll all be vaporised if something out of your control goes wrong”
it seems to me, that little innocent hole in the wing could have just as easily cut fuel lines to the other engine, blown a hole in the cabin, or better yet, ripped the wing off. quickly getting “the worlds safest airline” a prestigious number 4 spot on the list of deadliest air crashes of all time, and runner up for single aircraft crashes.
anon
Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 7:08 PMmissing detail, what about the fact that the hole in the wing took out the fire fighting equipment for the engines, and that they lost control of the other engine and could not shut it down after landing?
Ben
Friday, November 12, 2010 at 2:45 PMI vote for this as the most misleading headline of the week.
TVAddict
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 1:03 PMMy wife and kid were on this flight with me. And everyone got real tense when it exploded. Some flames, smoke and a shudder..
Really scary when you have never had anything like this in 20 years of flying in planes regularly. Qantas has just had problem after problem.. Although this is a design fault, many other issues recently are maintenance short cuts.
Alan Joyce (CEO, Qantas), needs to get the sack, because he is cutting costs and it’s starting to show. Qantas is trying to look like a full service airline but in fact they’re cutting corners now. Not gonna be flying Qantas much until they sort their rubbish out.