Originally Posted by
Giant Bird
I read that ETOPS on the RR powered 787 has been reduced to 60 minutes. I was surprised when I flew from SCL to MEL 10 days ago that it was a RR powered 787. I spoke to the pilot as to how come they were operating a route which required ETOPS 280 with the RR engines. He said that it was ok as the operation hours on these engines were lower that any of the engines which had to be shutdown by ANA or ANZ. LATAM were pulling the aircraft out of service when the operating hours got closer to the historical shut-down hours. This made me very nervous. My view is that defective engine design is defective, unreliable is unreliable, to operate these engines at ETOPS 330 in my view is against ETOPS principles even if it is within the regulations. There are so many factors that you cannot predict exactly as to after how many hours the defect will cause a failure. Just like in QF32 where RR gambled that their known oil pump defect would not fail early and lost the bet. Because the QF A380's were being used differently to the SQ and other A380's and therefore the engine failed earlier. They cannot be 100% sure that there will not be some previously unknown factor that will be different on the LATAM 787's which will mean they will fail earlier than the ANA and ANZ. I do not want to be 280 minutes from the nearest airport when one engine has to be shutdown and the other has the same design defect. Lucky it was a daytime flight and I told my wife that we needed to make sure one of us was always awake and if anything unusual seemed to be happening to wake me immediately if I was asleep.
correct ETOPS has been reduced to 60 mins but only on certain marks of the RR Trent 1000 engines and date of manufacture (so not all RR 787's affected)