Rolls Royce admits it ‘fell short’ over A380 engine blast
Rolls-Royce’s engineering chief has admitted it "fell short" after Australian investigators blamed it for a mid-air failure of a Qantas A380 in November 2010.
The manufacturer said it "regrets" the incident, which led to the temporary grounding of Qantas’s entire fleet of A380s.
“On this occasion we clearly fell short,” said Rolls Royce’s director of engineering and technology Colin Smith in a statement.
“This was a serious and rare event which we very much regret."
Investigators said lax manufacturing procedures were to blame for a fatigue crack in an oil feed pipe in the Rolls Royce Trent 900 engine.
The regulator said the pipe was made with a thin wall section and “did not comply” with design specifications.
Rolls-Royce said that it supported the findings of the ATSB and assured that the pipe was one of a small number which had been made faulty due to a "measurement error".
It said steps have since seen been taken to prevent future incidents.
“We support the ATSB’s conclusions and, as the report notes, have already applied the lessons learned throughout our engineering, manufacturing and quality assurance procedures to prevent this type of event from happening again,” said Smith.
The Qantas aircraft, with more than 440 people on board, made an emergency landing in Singapore and none of the passengers was injured.
Rolls-Royce has already agreed to pay Qantas £58 million in compensation.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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