F-HPJE has been sitting in Goose for 45 days now, with no imminent obvious movement...

I guess AF has decided maybe they can live without her for some time? Or... not worth it to repair?

Via Flightradar24:

FR24 doesn't quote any source for the 3-engine-ferry scenario (and I doubt they have access to any inside information) so that likely comes from the same source (Reuters) that originally quoted speculation about the recovery by an unnamed investigator from the BEA (who won't have any say in how it's done).

AFAIK there has been no subsequent announcement from those who will decide - the airline and the regulator - in support of that proposition, so don't be surprised if the aircraft finally departs with a full complement of operating engines.

For the damaged engine to be flown out on 25th November will require it to have been removed from F-HPJE (obviously) - so work on F-HPJE will be expected soon.

Engine has already been removed and is quarantined in the hangar.

Would EA have had the opportunity to change things (in the engine control, FADEC or whatever it is called on this engine) to redefine when engine is shut down e.g. with increased vibration ... assuming existing data supports such a modification ?
If that happened (change of firmware/software as a result of the accident), who would know?

I think you will find they thought of that one too, way back at the design stage.

Well yes of course :)
But it does not mean that there can't be any fine tuning later on?

Edit: maybe I misunderstood. That is _not_ done? Warning only, maybe? (Still the question stands ... thresholds could be adjusted ... no?)
I understand there might have been no sign until too late. But someone has that data.

Are there any recent pics of this A380 parked at this cold snowy remote airport ?

Designers (and regulators) are very leery of systems that can automatically and unilaterally shut down an engine in-flight. That's because, no matter how much testing you do, you can never completely rule out a 'false positive'. Worse, since it's in software, the conditions that result in a false positive could easily exist on multiple engines at the same time (say, for example, a lightning strike transient that fools the detection logic). Having all your engines suddenly shut down automatically in flight generally results in a really bad day. :(
So, flight deck warning that instructs the pilot to shut it down - yes, auto-shutdown, no...

I drive past it several times a day. It's a military airfield so photography is not allowed without permission otherwise I would take a few.

Given the overall situation with the A380 it would be interesting to know at what point it would become more economical to write off the aircraft? The lease runs ten years and Air France are currently not investing in the cabins. They need to return the aircraft in good condition which may be tricky given the event. An insurance loss followed by parting out must be being considered. It sounds crazy with such a young aircraft so hopefully not. But then again might this also be the aircraft that was involved in the collision with the regional jet at JFK? Of course it can just as easily be argued that it may be simpler to repair the aircraft and extend the lease rather engage in a battle which may further harm the A380 programm and therefore indirectly France.

No, it isn't.

The aircraft is insured to a defined value which declines at an agreed rate over the years: it has no relation to whatever the actual current market value of the aircraft is at any point in time. In this instance, as in the case of the QF A380, the costs of the repair will be substantially less than the insured hull value so no insurer would agree to a write-off followed by part out.

agree ... but I have seen cases in the past where airlines pressure the repairer to inflate cost estimates in the hope of getting a write off. I don't mean to suggest that is the case here, but only that it is a possible response in a case.

The aircraft belongs to a group of investors, who I suspect would have been pretty happy then, if the aircraft had been damaged sufficiently to be written off, of course without injury, as that sounds to be a lot more than the current realistic valuation. I wonder how the economic cost of the aircraft on ground (aog) is covered. The leasing cost alone will be around 50,000 euros a day without any of the associated replacement aircraft costs. My airline only insures part of this. Probably lucky for Air France it happened in autumn rather than spring in terms of maybe having spare capacity.

I doubt that AF carry AOG cover but I suspect, depending upon the eventually determined cause of the engine disintegration, EA may be making a contribution - possibly via spares or other MTX credits. I believe that RR did something similar after QF32.

Will AF or Airbus pilots fly it back?

Very unlikely to be Airbus - insurance companies really frown on having someone other than an employee of the insured company flying the insured aircraft. If something does go wrong the lawyers would have a field day (used to run into that when Boeing wanted to do a remote flight test on a customer aircraft - getting the insurance straightened out was usually the biggest stumbling block since we needed a Boeing flight test pilot to fly the test).
They may well have one or more Airbus people ride along as 'consultants' though.

Finance/Insurance always gets in the way. I'd have thought that any pilot with the right certification / license / formally documented training and hours would be as good as any other. Or do the insurance companies think that all that training somehow produces significantly uneven results?

Depending on what caused the accident, it could also be a good idea to revisit (in court) the issue whether the regulator is possibly liable for negligent certification.

got any court ruling examples in the last 50 years within the US or EU sphere?

If the lawyers are already involved then it likely won't move for several more months.

Several more months? Not surprising, since this is a complex dance of sorts in which everyone involved is trying to see to it that they get the best deal after all the dust settles.

If the legal issues involved in this aircraft's engine problems are anything like what happens in the US when an Amtrak (US national passenger rail system) car gets damaged, that may well take years. I really hope all of these problems -- mechanical and logistical and administrative and financial and legal and insurance -- get resolved fairly and soon.

Won't sitting outside in the weather for months cause problems? Or are there ways to protect her until she can be flown out? (I only ask because I do not know, not being any kind of aviation professional, and I want to learn.)

According to latest news , a new engine will arrive in Goose Bay today and the A380 will return to france in december .

https://www.pilootenvliegtuig.nl/201...80-800-canada/

Bit difficult establishing market value right now as there have been no known transactions. At some point some bright spark will buy them up cheap and make a decent return, as happened in the past with a number of aircraft, viscounts and fokkers spring to mind. Hifly and Amadeo have made moves, who knows how realistic, let’s see what happens.

I am not a lawyer :) but found this interesting
http://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewconte...7&context=jalc

From the boneyard?

Well from Tucson, at least.

The An-124 routed Davis-Monthan-Goose Bay-Toulouse-Kiev, so it's almost certainly connected with the Airbus, but it's not immediately obvious where the replacement engine would have originated from or where the remains of the original one were bound.

I believe we know the remains of the damaged engine are going to Cardiff.

A second An-124 arrived at CDG a couple of hours ago from DXB, reportedly enroute to Goose Bay and presumably carrying an Emirates-sourced engine.

That must have hurt AF, having to ask EK for an engine.

Who says AF did the asking ? :hmm:

If it isn't going to be running during the ferry it needn't be new or fresh out of the shop, so I wonder if the engine is borrowed from A6-EDF or A6-EDP, both of which entered the Dubai maintenance facility in the last 8/9 days according to The EK Source ...

We don't know for sure that the replacement engine isn't going to be operating, particularly as the consensus seems to be that it's an AF crew who will be flying the aircraft out.

Come to that, if it turns out to be a four-engined ferry there's no reason why the new engine needs to be a freshly overhauled one. The other three obviously aren't.

Engine manufactures routinely have a number of "lease pool" engines - engines that belong to the manufacturer but are leased to operators who - for whatever reason - have run low on spares. Given that half the in-service fleet is based out of DXB, it would be a logical place to park a lease pool spare.
In other words, that the engine was in Dubai doesn't mean the engine belongs to EK.

I have read that the 'ferry' engine is from Airbus, most probably an original engine from MSN004 left over from when it was converted to RR engines.

Well whatever the source and the story, they'll be able to unwrap the offering in Goose Bay before tea time now.

Learn something new every day. Can the manufacturer order it be removed from from an operating aircraft that’s scheduled to fly, or just one that’s spare?

This is why I look forward to your posts, they bring a

just look up what a lease is. there are leased cars too.

including a clause in a contract that the owning party can cancel the lease any time would really drive down the price of the lease. so i would presume no there is no such clause. and airlines would never agree to such a clause.

so if the engine is currently leased the manufacturer wouldn't have the right to take possession of the engine even if it was a spare.
what the other poster meant: emirates leases quite a few engines so it's logical to assume EA would have an engine ready to lease for emirates or one for that the lease has expired.

It depends. As wiedehopf notes, some operators depend on lease engines for day-to-day operations, others only use them to fill in when something unexpected happens.
An example of the latter might be an operator had to pull a couple engines unexpectedly - and it'll be several months before they come back out of overhaul. So they lease an engine for six months to tide them over, figuring at the end of six months they'll be good again. Except that at the end of that six months, they've had a couple more engines go south unexpectedly and they still need the lease engine. They go back to the engine manufacture and ask to extend the lease - at that point the manufacture can legitimately tell them no, I need the engine back, I've promised it to XYZ - sorry... Of course if they don't need it back they'd be happy to extend the lease.
I used to sit in technical reviews with all three major manufactures - and one of the first things on the agenda was spares status - both of the engines owned by the operators and the manufacture's spares pool. Usually it was routine, but occasionally it would be tight and there was concern that an unplanned removal could force an AOG situation... However I can't recall an actual extended AOG situation caused by lack of spare engines (beyond the 'normal' time to get a crew and spare to remote airport and R&R the engine).