Monday, November 8, 2010

Rolls Royce Issues statement on the Trent 900 incident

Below is RR's statement regarding the Trent 900 failure on QF32. The main takeaway is that the failure on flight 32 is unrelated to the failure of the Trent 1000 in early August.

Trent 900 statement
Monday, 8 November 2010

Rolls-Royce has made progress in understanding the cause of the engine failure on the Trent 900 powered A380 Qantas flight QF32 on 4 November 2010. It is now clear this incident is specific to the Trent 900 engine.

As a result, a series of checks and inspections has been agreed with Airbus, with operators of the Trent 900 powered A380 and with the airworthiness authorities. These are being progressively completed which is allowing a resumption of operation of aircraft in full compliance with all safety standards. We are working in close cooperation with Airbus, our customers and the authorities, and as always safety remains our highest priority.

We can be certain that the separate Trent 1000 event which occurred in August 2010 on a test bed in Derby is unconnected. This incident happened during a development programme with an engine operating outside normal parameters. We understand the cause and a solution has been implemented.

The Trent 900 incident is the first of its kind to occur on a large civil Rolls-Royce engine since 1994. Since then Rolls-Royce has accumulated 142 million hours of flight on Trent and RB211 engines.

We will provide a further update with our interim management statement on 12 November 2010.

3 comments:

GP said...

It seems that Qantas has unique thrust and torque characteristics to their Trent 900 engines that may have contributed to the problem. This still could be an issue for the Trent 1000s, time will tell.

As for the Pratt and Whitney patent infringement claim, I doubt that they will stop RR from delivering any engines even if RR were to lose. A licensing agreement would be worked out. The reason that the PW side is not likely to stop deliveries is 1) that they would have to show that the infringement is material (what did RR do? copy the entire engine?) and 2) if PW were to try and stop deliveries and fail to prevail in litigation, they would be in a very bad position for a counter suit and damages. PW is in bad shape because they have not kept up with GE and RR in engine design.

Matheus Ecke said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
GP said...

Discuss the emergency landing in texas of a 787!