Barit1
Can anyone tell me if the oil supply pressure is regulated on the Trent?
If it is a simple unregulated system, ala most turbine engines I know, then the pipe breakage would immediately show up as a drop in oil pressure. Trend monitoring, either manual or automatic, would pick this up.
Likely would not change the outcome, unless the crew shut down #2 immediately; but would be a valuable clue in sorting out the origin of the failure.
The more fancy you get with this kind of trend monitoring the less conclusive it is.
The oil systems have many leakage paths like overboard breathers etc. Thus some perfectly safe engines leak even more than the engine that is not safe (false positives). The key is the type and location of the leak. The worst leak is wet oil (not just fumes) directly into a rotor disk cavity.
More than just RR has had this problem. The solutions are typically problem specific (based on data). The surprise here was that the result didn't seem to be forewarned by previous data (or was it?).
However armed with the latest information the going forward approach would be obvious and hindsight truly a lesson learned for all manufacturers and users.
To me the part defect should not be unexpected, however we shouldn't have expected the surprise result without a clue beforehand (FAR/JAR 33.75)