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Qantas says 14 A380 engines affected
18/11/2010 1:27:02 PM
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce says up to 14 Rolls Royce engines on the airline's A380s will need to be inspected and potentially replaced.
Rolls Royce had indicated about 40 A380 engines needed to be swapped worldwide, Mr Joyce said.
The airline expects to know within two days how many engines need to be taken off its planes so Rolls Royce can make a modification.
"Rolls Royce are still working through the criteria for which engines need to be changed," Mr Joyce told reporters in Sydney on Thursday.
"We'll have a daily dialogue with Rolls Royce to determine which engines actually need to be taken off.
"We're hoping to understand precisely which engines need to be replaced and therefore we can have a firm timeline for when they will be back in the air, but we are still a few days away from that."
Qantas grounded its six A380s on November 4 after oil caught fire in one of fleet's Rolls Royce Trent 900 engines on a flight over Indonesia.
The fire heated metal parts and caused the motor to disintegrate before the jetliner returned safely to Singapore.
Four days later, the airline said checks had revealed suspicious oil leaks in three engines on three different grounded A380s.
Mr Joyce on Thursday said airline capacity had been reduced by four per cent due to the grounding its A380 fleet.
"We have taken about four to five per cent of capacity off by scaling down the size of aircraft," he said.
"So where A380s were planning to fly we've got 747s. Where 747s were planning to fly, in some parts of the network we've got 330s."
Qantas would seek compensation from Rolls Royce once the A380s were back in the air, Mr Joyce said, although it was still too early to determine the financial impact of having six A380s on the ground.
"The disruptions we're experiencing because we don't have a number of aircraft in the fleet, that is something that once this is all resolved we will have to talk to Rolls about as a consequence," he said
"But we are not even thinking about that yet. We are just thinking about getting the aircraft back into the air."
Rolls Royce had made changes to the design and manufacture of new A380 engines to stop oil leaks, but it had not done so to the engines on the Qantas A380 fleet.
"If this was significant, and was known to be significant, we would have liked to have known about that," Mr Joyce said.
"It doesn't look like it is a significant modification, but it is a modification that has an impact on how the engines are performing and it is a modification that indicates whether you are going to have a problem or not with the engine."
Rolls Royce was responsible for all maintenance on the A380 engines, Mr Joyce said.
He said the modification made by Rolls Royce to the engines on the production line appeared to be an indicator of potential problems.
Normally any modification made by an engine manufacturer would be retrofitted to each engine when it returned to the workshop for routine inspection and maintenance, Mr Joyce said.
"If this incident hadn't occurred, eventually all these engines would have had this modification," he said.
"Now because it is an indicator, we are not taking any risks.
"We're taking the engines off and making sure this modification is in place before the engines are put back on the aircraft."
Qantas is in talks with Airbus to replace some of its existing Rolls Royce engines with new engines from planes still in production on the Airbus assembly line