.....Board see someone being too frugal...

In normal words, a scapegoat....

I am not sure you are very familiar with design, testing, manufacturing and servicing of commercial turbofan engines in the aircraft engine industry today. First of all, Rolls Royce is in the process of restructuring their business organizations to eliminate duplications and eliminating businesses that don't contribute much to bottom line profitability with the goal of reducing costs to become more competitive in the marketplace. So are both GE and Pratt & Whitney. It is not unusual today in any business that wants to survive as a viable future business, even businesses that are not producing jet engines. Although there are technical issues on current engines in the field to be resolved, Rolls Royce has to stay cost competitive in the marketplace so don't confuse that business goal with a technical problem that will be resolved.

Secondly, you and infrequentflyer789 should understand that there have been over 30,000 CFM56 engines operating in the field since 1982. An aircraft with CFM56 engines takes off every three minutes 24-7, 365 days a year somewhere in the world, think about that for a moment. The idea that the CFM56 management structure should be overhauled, as suggested, because of two unfortunate technical incidents in 2018 is a bit of an overkill. Southwest Airlines had ultrasonically inspected 17,000 fan blades as a result of the first failure but before the second failure took place. No fan blades exhibiting fatigue cracks were found in any of the blades inspected. The CFM56 engines in the field have accumulated more than 30 million flight hours without any indication of the fan blade failures experienced in these two events. If anything, there may be improvements capable of being made to the engine inlet cowl to improve durability and absorb more of the energy when a fan blade is released, some potential improvements learned as result of these two incidents.

If they won't take the time to make/test safe aircraft engines, they shouldn't be in business.

Too many businesses taking short cuts these days, the race to the bottom seems to put a low priority on safety as a result.
Agile methodologies are not conducive to a quality product, instead putting the focus on finishing within a timeframe that is usually cast by a beancounter.

In your jet engine experience, how much time do you estimate it takes, a year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years or 50 years to make a turbo jet engine that never has a technical problem? I am really interesting in knowing your opinion as it will be indicative of your knowledge of the aircraft engine business...

Dee Vee

The operable word here is "If"

The authorities as well as others on this forum don't agree with you

time to move on unless/until new facts are in evidence

How do you test an engine which is to be run 18 hours a day, over a period of four years, after which it is overhauled and parts replaced as a matter of course as part of the design ? And then do it for a population count of a few thousand engines to get all the performance flaws which only appear after tens of millions of miles ?

Put every engine on an aircraft wing and fly it around empty for fours years and then only put it on a passenger aircraft ?

Clearly, you have no idea what you're talking about in the context of aerospace and think you're buying something like a fridge.

Given that nobody has sustained any injury, nor any airframe been breached, one cannot say the engines are not safe.

Which is more than can be said for another manufacturer's product.

"Rolls Royce operations head Simon Kirby to leave in summer after only 19 months in role."

I wonder how many squintillions his severance package will be!

What? Jealous? Moi?

Mac

Boeing sends exec to help Rolls-Royce fix 787 engine woes
 

https://www.seattletimes.com/busines...87-engine-woes

damage limitation for the Boeing Brand - ?

Not a big deal, it's done frequently when big money is at stake. It tends to answer questions faster

Boeing has dispatched a prominent executive to help..

LMFAO!

It probably is a big deal for an Airline when nearly half its 787 fleet are unavailable, engineless, or being worked on, scheduled maintenance, or just swapping engines at any one time. Add to that the massive cost of temporarily retraining idle pilots on to their previous type. And leasing a number of those types to cover your schedules.
Presumably being billed to RR?
Is there actually a definitive technical fix in the pipeline??

There's an Air Austral 787 parked outide the Monarch Engineering at BHX hangar enginless. Both I believe have been transferred to Derby. It's been there for weeks.

Saw G-VBOW of Virgin without donks at LHR this week, plus looked like three others at the hangar, are there really four parked up without engines?

G-VWHO B789 not flown since 07/10/2017
G-VBOW B789 not flown since 19/04/2018
G-VFAN B789 not flown since 30/04/2018

I read that ETOPS on the RR powered 787 has been reduced to 60 minutes. I was surprised when I flew from SCL to MEL 10 days ago that it was a RR powered 787. I spoke to the pilot as to how come they were operating a route which required ETOPS 280 with the RR engines. He said that it was ok as the operation hours on these engines were lower that any of the engines which had to be shutdown by ANA or ANZ. LATAM were pulling the aircraft out of service when the operating hours got closer to the historical shut-down hours. This made me very nervous. My view is that defective engine design is defective, unreliable is unreliable, to operate these engines at ETOPS 330 in my view is against ETOPS principles even if it is within the regulations. There are so many factors that you cannot predict exactly as to after how many hours the defect will cause a failure. Just like in QF32 where RR gambled that their known oil pump defect would not fail early and lost the bet. Because the QF A380's were being used differently to the SQ and other A380's and therefore the engine failed earlier. They cannot be 100% sure that there will not be some previously unknown factor that will be different on the LATAM 787's which will mean they will fail earlier than the ANA and ANZ. I do not want to be 280 minutes from the nearest airport when one engine has to be shutdown and the other has the same design defect. Lucky it was a daytime flight and I told my wife that we needed to make sure one of us was always awake and if anything unusual seemed to be happening to wake me immediately if I was asleep.

correct ETOPS has been reduced to 60 mins but only on certain marks of the RR Trent 1000 engines and date of manufacture (so not all RR 787's affected)

Giant Bird is correct thinking this is abusing the spirit of ETOPS rules. The risk may be small, but the practice carries the potential for a massive corporate disaster.

There is no Gods of spirit when it comes to flight safety. It is fundamentally based on statistics from historical data..

Even when assuming there is an outlier earlier engine failure than expected, when you estimate a second engine going you are well within the average non-RR fleet probability of completing that sngle flight

Except that the data indicates that the reliability is rather different in reality from that forecast, so something is not adequately understood. Continuing full ETOPS operations seems complacent under these circumstances.

RR Trent-TEN
 

Some of the airlines taking delivery of RR powered 787-8 have the Trent Ten installed and all 787-9 only use the Ten, this engine has no restrictions on ETOPS or anything else in relation to the engine.
It is only the package "C" engines which have the restrictions on them.

Trent Ten has no restrictions for now....

Glad, I know you're being somewhat sarcastic (at least I hope so), but aside from knowing Keith Leverkuhn personally (and having a great deal of respect for his abilities), this is SOP - my biggest surprise is it's taken this long. Keith isn't on his own - he's leading a team (I also know at least one of the people on that team).
This may seem silly to have aircraft people oversee what the engine experts are doing, but you'd be amazed at what people who are too close to the issue can miss. ~30 years ago I was on a similar team sent to Rolls because of a problem with the RB211-524G/H Pump and Governor (PAG) that had caused several shutdowns soon after EIS on the 747-400 (coincidently Keith L was on that team as well, although as a worker bee like me, not the leader). We did a design review and some of the issues were along the line of 'what were you thinking'? One issue that I remember distinctly was they had a room where they did computer inspections of some of the components - the measurements in question being to 0.00001 inches. Not only was it not a 'clean room', the room was in fact filthy - to the point where they'd created a special computer routine to detect when the measurement was corrupted by dust/dirt :sad: . When we told them you need to be doing that inspection in a 'clean room' - they looked flabbergasted :ugh:.
At about the same time, we had issues on another engine type due to bad Electro Hydraulic Servo Valves (EHSV) in the fuel control. The problem was traced to built-in contamination - turned out they'd assemble the EHSV in a 'clean room', took it to 'dirty' room to solder the electrical connections, then take it back to the 'clean room' and seal it :ugh: You could almost hear the heads hitting walls when the report came out...
In short, it never hurts to get a new set of eyes looking at a problem.

Yea, just a minor problem when they stick full open on a start at the gate. They got the finest filters to catch the critical size bits of dirt, but they don't work so well when they are already built in.

Jumpjim
 

Sorry what l meant to say was, "Some of the airlines taking delivery of RR powered 787-8 & 787-9 have the Trent Ten installed and all 787-10 only use the Ten."

Are you nervous in all forms of travel or just where aviation is concerned? Do you make sure one of you stays awake when driving down the motorway, you know, just in case? What exactly did you think you were going to do if something 'unusual happened'?

The QF32 incident was not a pump fault.
From wiki
It wasn't a known design defect either, it was a manufacturering fault that was later discovered on several other engines worldwide after inspections. No gambling was involved. Quality control at RR however came under scrutiny, quite rightly.
It was not a predicted failure, so the rest of your post needs to be addressed.
Predictable failures are handled by 'lifeing' the componant/engine/airframe. The lifeing element takes into account cycles as well as flying hours in addition to many other forms of condition monitoring and inspection. A factor of safety is added and worse case scenario taken into account. Thats how all aircraft are operated, You could apply your logic to every critical componant on the aircraft. But you don't.

Many componants fail in service before predicted. Trends are looked at and new life rules applied often with interim inspections. This RR case is no different jus a hell of a lot more expensive.

GE had flame out issues on their GEnX engine in the early years, its now a very reliable and popular engine. RR are not unique but people do like to kick a horse when its down don't they?

Thanks, Turin, in responding to the Giant Bird post. I was going to respond but hadn't the time to look up the ATSB accident report. Some people seem to think jet engines are as simple as lawnmower engines, they aren't. There are thousands of components which make up a jet engine, manufactured by hundreds of companies worldwide. The safety record for aircraft and their jet engines are really quite remarkable, resulting from quality control practices, certification requirements and design safety redundancy for certain components.

Turbine D
How right you are! But do you remember that at the introduction of the jet engine its major benefit was seen as SIMPLICITY, because it got rid of all those ridiculous reciprocating pistons, valves, con rods, etc? Ah, progress!

According to RR they are attempting to accelerate the fix process and "A revised compressor blade has been installed in a test engine." They hope to bump replacements from 2019 to 2018.

RR reportedly also stated " has been able to accelerate the development of the new blade through a combination of the latest computing capability, ‘fast make’ competencies within our supply chain..." I'm not familiar with 'fast make' comptencies - can anyone explain the concept?

https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/ou...-response.aspx

In another press release, RR indicated that disruptions will get worse before they get better.

Sounds like a euphemism for "agile", which is what got them into trouble in the first place.

Maybe they will get "lucky" this time.

35 aircraft grounded?
 

Hangar,no has an article quoting Norwegian saying they have 2 Dreamliners grounded indefinitely, one in OSL and one in CPH.
RR says there is 35 world wide and this could soon hit 50.
Expect a solution by fall.
It is officially The NightmareLiner.

BluSdUp
"It is officially The NightmareLiner."
Try and think of something catchy to blame RR, not Boeing.
f

Nobody from the FAA gave a flying f*** when GE/PW engines went up in flames. The AD first came when it hit a RR.
America First :-D

lansen

in spite of your rhetoric and lack of detail

it makes a difference in what the unsafe condition is and what authority develops the AD.corrective action.

Who gets hurt the most is divvied up between the engine manufacturer and the installer on the airplane. The FAA is not out to pick sides but only out to accept proposed corrective actions to protect the airplane and its passengers.

oh dear, Rolls-Royce says Trent 1000 problem now found in B engines

more engines