There have been two recent turn backs of Qantas flights - reason for both reported as engine vibration.
Second Qantas flight turned back after 'vibrating' engine
I'm interested to know why this might be happening - I did a bit of google'ing, and found a lot of interesting stuff about the sophisticated vibration monitoring gear that's available, although not a lot of information about what's actually fitted to current generation aircraft.
It seems to me that engine vibration data would be part of the data that's continually fed back to airline maintenance. So maintenance would be able to see any trend of increasing vibration, and schedule an engine change or whatever is required to fix the issue *before* it became bad enough to warrant a turn-back. I can't believe that Qantas would be silly enough to simply ignore an increasing trend in engine vibration - must be much more expensive to turn around a plane full of passengers than take action before hand.
So can anyone enlighten me as to why engine vibration would "suddenly" increase enough to generate an ECAM warning? Could it be due to the engine ingesting something small (other than, say, Canada geese!) while in flight?
(P.S. Not a pilot, but an Engineer with a keen interest in aviation)