Rj111
There are many reasons why airlines select particular engines, why air-framers offer three, two, or one brand of engines for a given aircraft, or why engine producers choose to participate in a particular aircraft program or not.
Of course airlines are now going away from the Trent for the 777, GE bought their way into the LR program.
GE had an engine (GE90-115) that was already developed and certified by EASA & FAA. Rolls Royce did not. That meant GE could and did offer a better deal to Boeing looking at both timing and total aircraft certification cost which permitted Boeing to get this plane into revenue service sooner at lower cost than other alternatives.
I was mainly speaking of the Trents.
There are various reasons an airline selects a particular engine verses another besides SPF. These reasons include but are not limited to logistics, parts commonality, historical airline/engine manufacturer relationships over time, training costs for both crews and maintenance and so forth. Trent engines will continue to be sold to those operators where it makes total economic sense, relationships continue to be good and service is good.
Engine manufacturers carefully choose which programs to offer engines to or not. For example, GE chose not to participate in the Boeing 757 program because, at the time, they did not see a payback with three engine manufacturers participating, leaving only PW & RR to compete against one another. PW & GE decided not to compete on the A-350 program, leaving RR as the sole supplier. When the final A-350 design was released, the proposed GEnx engine for an earlier A-350 design concept was withdrawn as the final A-350 aircraft competes against the Boeing 777 ER/LR (GE90-115). It is business strategy at play, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
How much of world heard about N330AA?
Probably not much of the world knew. It was a ground failure. In fact, it probably shouldn't have happened. On the previous flight, the pilot reported unusual in-flight engine vibration, but to the degree not requiring the engine to be shut down. So instead of removing the engine from service and investigating what the cause might be, the decision was made to take the plane to a more remote area and run the engine up to full TO thrust. The problem was the HPT disk had developed a crack at one of the disk blade posts and the rest is history. The press wasn't there as it wasn't an in-flight uncontained failure during climb-out from the airport as was the Qantas incident. By the way, N330 was written off by the insurers and was dismantled on site at LAX.