`Incredibly Lucky' Qantas Passengers - Aviation Expert

[GoFlyKiteNow]

Qantas A380 Spitting Parts Spares `Incredibly Lucky' Passengers
Bloomberg.
By Andrea Rothman, Mary Jane Credeur and Howard Mustoe - Nov 5, 2010 7:05 AM GMT+0800

The 466 passengers and crew aboard a Qantas Airways Ltd. Airbus A380 survived a mid-flight engine blowout that aviation specialists said is both extremely rare and potentially fatal.

One of the four Rolls-Royce Group Plc Trent 900 engines blew up shortly after flight QF32 left Singapore for Sydney yesterday, piercing the wing and charring the turbine’s casing, with debris left scattered across an Indonesian island. The pilot made an emergency landing in Singapore, and Qantas said it will take its fleet of six A380 jets out of service for checks.

The strength of the blast, which ripped off part of the nacelle that houses the engine, could have caused parts to smash through the cabin or wing fuel tanks, bringing down the plane.

So-called uncontained failures occur about once a year on average, while fatalities only happen once a decade, said Paul Hayes, director of safety at aviation consulting firm Ascend.

“They were incredibly lucky,” said Hans Weber, president of Tecop International Inc., an aviation firm in San Diego, who advises the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on issues including engine safety. “These were highly energetic fragments that can penetrate structures easily as projectiles.”
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[GoFlyKiteNow]

The Trent 900 engine was specifically designed for the A380 and is only used on that aircraft. Out of the 14 operators who have ordered the A380, nine have selected the variant with the Trent 900, according to Rolls-Royce. The engine, which has a takeoff thrust of 70,000 pounds, was first certified in 2004 and powered the first-ever flight of an A380 a year later.

Each of the four engines weighs 14,190 pounds (6.4 tons) and has a fan diameter of 116 inches (2.9 meters). The Trent 900 uses a so-called three-shaft design that is less common than the two-shaft configuration, making the engine lighter and shorter.

Engine failures are described as “uncontained” when the nacelle fails to hold in the debris. The Qantas aircraft involved in the incident was less than three years old and had logged 831 flight cycles until today, according to Airbus. While other Airbus A380 aircraft have experienced malfunctions of engines or other parts, none were as grave as on the Qantas jet.

“You can have a very catastrophic incident when there’s an uncontained failure,” said Fred Mirgle, who retired in 2009 as chair of the aviation maintenance department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida. “You could lose 300 or 400 people when an engine lets go like that.”