The two London incidents should actually make travellers flying A380s between Los Angeles and [Oz] more confident, because the five hours on three engines which the Qantas jet flew would have enabled the same jet to back track or divert to a range of airports ….within that same time at any stage of the…flight …to Australia, or …when flying to the US.
Contrary to what Ben Sandilands thinks, this SLF certainly will not be made “
more confident” by this second instance of a Trent 972 engine “problem”, “failure”, “shutdown” or whatever. Not after the initial 972 uncontained failure, the cause of which has yet to be determined. I note that in both recent incidents, an oil line failure is noted. I recall in the seemingly endless PPRuNe discussion about the ex-SIN explosion, the oil system is cited.
I had looked forward to my maiden A380 experience on the USA-OZ route; but now I’ll stick to the 747. I am also ruling out using the BA birds since the RR 900 versions differ only in the programming, not the oil system and lines. In fact, until more is known about the RR 900 problem, I’ll only consider an A380 powered by the GP7000.