Can someone remind Ken....
 

...of the various accidents/incidents where the crew/pax generally walked away but any attempts to recreate the scenario in the simulator usually results in pre-prepared C&T crews crashing. From memory, but not limited to:

- BA007
- DHL over Baghdad
- ......

Even the media didn't exaggerate it to that extent.....

The thrust was reduced to idle 2 hours out of London, about the middle of Europe I guess?

Sierra, I was flying around that time with QF, and it was a fairly peaceful time, with just the normal problems, and the F/E's mainly had to pencil in hold items and a few trans quals on a flight. Of course the engineers were happy little campers at that time, and had the old girls humming rather nicely. We never did have to worry about our duty free too much, and while we had to pod a donk every so often, it was never much of a drama. Of course there was some problems, the worst being the SP after finishing a roll at SYD and had come to a halt to turn around, suffered a nose wheel collapse on the runway. Rust being the cause, which should have been picked up, and that caused the **** to hit the fan. EBB left her aileron on the landing lights at FCU, and the combi was not a good look after flying thru volcanic dust over Indonesia. (needed four new donks, leading edges stuffed, and no vision from flt deck windows) besides those little incidents, and the occasional overspeed, there were no major problems of epic proportions that I was aware of, QF historians can add to this, but basically the airline was travelling rather nicely. Until the shareholder arrived. And Dixon. :{

Is this the same flight that had a bent bottle opener and a wheel missing off one of the food trolleys:ugh:

Stall boy it also had dead bugs on the windscreen. Live ones were on back order.

Obviously you were both in nappies at the time, explains everything.

Cheers Teresa.

Another London bound Qantas A380 engine problem
 

Ben Sandilands writes-

Another London bound Qantas A380 engine problem – Plane Talking

Another Qantas A380 has finished its flight from Singapore to London on only three engines after a recurrence of a problem with an oil feed line on one of the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines fitted to the giant airliner.

This time (on February 24) the A380 flew for the last five hours with one engine reduced to idle (effectively delivering no power, but able to be called upon if needed). In the earlier, similar incident on February 15 a different Qantas A380 flying the same route encountered reduced oil pressure in an engine while near New Delhi, however the crew didn’t need to reduce the power to idle until they were two hours from London.

Both incidents are being investigated by the ATSB, and in the case of the latest engine-to-idle incident, it happened near Ashgabat in Turkmenistan.

It should be emphasised neither of these incidents posed a significant threat to the safety of the flights, but they definitely pose a risk to Rolls-Royce, which has been caught in the spotlights of airline disfavor after the disintegration of the same engine type on a Qantas A380 just after it had departed from Singapore for Sydney on November 4.

That incident seriously damaged the very first A380 Qantas put into service, ripping 27 holes in its wing, disabling one of two hydraulic control systems, and compromising the handling of the jet, which is still on the ground in Singapore pending extremely expensive but fully insured repairs.

Plane Talking can report that in each of the Qantas incidents affecting London flights an external high pressure/intermediate pressure oil line was found to have worked loose enough to compromise the oil feed. At least four similar incidents are understood to have occurred on the same engine type fitted to the Singapore Airlines fleet of A380s.

Each of the Qantas A380 flights to London to experience this problem were able to retain a normal cruising altitude, in the first case remaining at 38,000 feet until cleared to descend to Heathrow airport, and maintaining 36,000 feet after the second incident over Turkmenistan. An A380 can cruise at 41,000 feet, however operational cruise levels over Europe are often reduced because of higher level headwinds or air traffic control directions.

Earlier airliner designs, like the Boeing 747 or big twins engined jets like the A330s or Boeing 777s cannot maintain similar altitudes to the A380 in these circumstances, and the twin engined designs take larger reductions in the form of single engine cruise speeds and altitudes than four engined designs. In a four engined jet the loss of one engine doesn’t necessarily require a landing at the nearest suitable airport, as is the case in twin engined jets, but the usual operating procedure is for the crew of the quad jet to plan for the loss of a second engine, which would require an immediate diversion on the remaining two engines.

The two London incidents should actually make travellers flying A380s between Los Angeles and Sydney or Melbourne 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 in California, Hawaii, Tahiti, and Nadi (Fiji) or Noumea or Auckland within that same time at any stage of the 14-15 hours flight time for against headwinds to Australia, or just over 13 hours when flying to the US.

Ben Sandilands is way off base!
 

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.

Not excusing the Company here but many people forget that the Qantas of the late 70-80s was nothing like the size of Qantas today...... even if the ultimate aim of the current Board is to make it so.

Qantas in the early 80's flew a smallish number of one type of aircraft on the longest average sector length's in the world.

The ASK's and sector numbers from the two incarnations of the same Company simply do not compare. What matter then is the rate of incidents; something that would be very interesting to compare.

the comparison would be interesting - even weighting for technology it would appear that the latter is racking up more incidents of significance (just a guess but I'd love to see the data).

Interesting though that the second LHR 'incident' echoes the first and again raises the issue of review, governance and oversight when critical functions are jobbed out. Single contract responsibility may be good for the P&L (and the statement of claim for that matter) but it is not always good for the product or your employees.

Slight diversion:
Also interesting that "informed anecdotal" suggests that both the a/c have a comparitively higher use of theraputic oxygen (ex bottles) in the cabin - as did OQA. Not enough data to make a determination but an interesting trend.

AT

kappa, I get the impression they have a very good idea what happened. Hence their return to service.
Have you read the ATSB Preliminary Report in regards the uncontained event!

Yes, I had read it; and now rereading it reinforces my interpretation that they know what happened, but not why it happened. And that is the opinion of most posters to the thread on the Tech Log forum.
There are a total of 32 of these engines on the 8 QF A380s – and two have had identical oil feed/loss problems. Not at all confidence building after the total loss of a third engine.

The Qantas Thread over in Tech Log
 

Kappa If you read thru the thread over there very carefully you will see that we know exactly why it is happening now and why the engine exploded You really need to follow all the links and it will take a good three to four hours.

I will add that this is no fault whatsoever of the Qantas staff.

I'd have to ask. If they knew the cause after the first incident, why did it happen again?

Posters here have explained the capability of the aircraft to fly on 3 engines. How would she go on 2?

DERG, I’ve grow dizzy reading since day one the posts (on both the original Rumours forum thread and the subsequent thread on Tech Log) by you, Turbine D, bearfoil, et. al., and the discussion of offset boring, critical oil temp, etc. I will admit that in recent days I have only skimmed the posts and if there is now consensus on the exact cause of the uncontained failure, I have missed it. And your views are certainly not without question on that thread.

I am willing to await an official report. But on this thread I have only expressed my reasoned views about flying on aircraft with the RR Trent 972 engines.

Or how would QANTAS cope with the publicity of an AOG in some place we haven't yet thought of as an A380 alternative field? I doubt an A380 can fly such distances with 3 or 4 engines at idle.

Given the 7.2% rise in tourist numbers and QANTAS seeing 2% fall in international passengers, passengers must be thinking with their feet against QANTAS. A diversionary landing might be seen as further evidence against flying with QANTAS.

Qantas in foreign territory as overseas passenger numbers slide | Adelaide Now

How would that look at 530 tonnes?

I'm just at a loss to understand why anyone would believe Qantas every time they have an incident and declare "This is not a safety issue".

The 32 was a major incident due to the uncontained engine failure.

Since then, from all accounts, another failure occured for the same reason.

I'm not aware of any modification that has since been carried out on those engines to strenghen the containment of engine components that let go.

I think it's time for some people to wake up. The blame game has to end and the heads need to come out of the sand. The engine issues are the tip of the iceberg

Some of these post remind me of the Irish joke with one engine after another giving up and the flight time ever increasing and one pax saying if this keeps going on we'll be up here all night.

It does not matter how good the aircraft is and how it's performance is affected with one engine out.

If the same problem is continuing and it has happened again to one engine it can happen to the others and if that's not a safety issue I don't know
what is.