Qantas Plane Returns to Airport After Engine Failure

Qantas Airways Ltd., Australia’s largest airline, said a Boeing Co. 747 jumbo jet bound for Sydney had to return to San Francisco after an engine failed soon after take-off.

The crew on the Aug. 30 flight shut the engine off, Qantas said in an e-mailed statement today. The airline will investigate the “extremely rare” incident with engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce Group Plc, Sydney-based Qantas said.

Qantas said a replacement engine is on its way to San Francisco, and that passengers on the plane were given accommodation and booked on a Qantas service from Los Angeles to Sydney. A Rolls-Royce spokesman declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg news.

The incident follows Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s shutdown of one of four Trent 900 engines powering an Airbus SAS A380 as it neared its destination of Frankfurt earlier this month. Flight crew detected a change in oil pressure that was probably the result of dirt particles clogging a filter in the hydraulic circulation system, Lufthansa said. The engine was replaced and the plane resumed service to Tokyo.

Rolls-Royce temporarily closed a site used to trial jet engines for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner model and the rival Airbus SAS A350 after a $17 million turbine blew up on the test bed on Aug. 2. The failure of the Trent 1000 engine, which powers the Dreamliner, resulted in “limited debris being released into the test facility,” Rolls-Royce spokesman Josh Rosenstock said in a telephone interview on Aug. 23.

In September 2009, a Singapore Airlines Ltd. Airbus A380 bound for Asia returned to Paris after one of its four engines failed, the first time a mechanical malfunction forced an in- flight turnaround of the world’s biggest passenger jet.

The A380 is certified as safe to fly with only three of its four engines, which led the pilot to return to Paris, where mechanics and other ground personnel could address the issue, Eric Heraud, a spokesman for France’s DGAC civil aviation authority, said at the time.

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Fenner in Sydney rfenner@bloomberg.net Howard Mustoe in London at hmustoe@bloomberg.net.

• Tweet
• More
  • Business Exchange
  • Buzz up!
  • Digg
• Print
• Email