Originally Posted by
musicrab
"Rolls-Royce ... knew about the faults that the current airworthiness directive concerning these engines says are likely to have caused an intense oil fire in a structural cavity in the intermediate pressure turbine area of the engine."
"Rolls-Royce had designed and was introducing a fix for the oil leak issues for this into the engines at its own speed. "
"And the questions concerning the timeliness of the Rolls-Royce responses to a known problem, and its capacity and willingness to share them with the airlines concerned will not go away. "
So, bottom line. I'll ask if nobody else will. Is he saying that the engine blowup was due to a problem that Rolls-Royce knew about and failed to remedy in the in-service T900s?
Yes, that's what he is saying.
Bigger question is, is he right ? Might be, but there are several other possibilities, and the published information is not enough to determine which is right.
An AD was already issued for increased inspection to cover a problem which looks very similar (
but may not actually be the same issue). So RR
had notified a problem and put in place mitigating inspections, presumably whilst working on a permanent fix. Possibly the inspections were insufficient.
Possibly this is a different problem, but the same permanent fix - in other words a problem was identified, notified, mitigated in service and fixed in production, but this event is a result of previously unknown consequences of the original design.