SYDNEY — Tests have uncovered oil leaks in three Rolls-Royce engines on Qantas’ grounded Airbus A380s, the airline’s CEO said Monday, as engineers tried to identify the cause of an engine failure on one of the carrier’s superjumbo jets last week.
Australia’s national carrier grounded its six double-decker A380s, the world’s newest and largest airliner, after an engine burst minutes into a flight from Singapore to Sydney last week, scattering debris over Indonesia’s Batam island. The plane made a safe emergency landing in Singapore.
Engineers conducted eight hours of extensive checks on each engine over the weekend.
On Monday, CEO Alan Joyce said engineers have discovered oil leaks in the turbine area of three engines on three different A380s.
“The oil leaks were beyond normal tolerances,” Joyce told reporters. “So Rolls-Royce and our engineers have looked at what we have gathered as an accepted level and they have passed that threshold.”
“All of these engines are new engines on a new aircraft type,” he added. “The engines are not performing to the parameters that you would expect with this.”
Because of that, he said, all of the airline’s A380s will be grounded for at least an additional 72 hours.
“We are not going to take any risks whatsoever,” Joyce said. “We want to make sure we have a 100 percent safe operation.”
All three affected engines have been removed from the planes for further testing, and will be replaced with spare engines the airline has on hand, Joyce said.
“As a consequence, it’s now narrowing our focus on that issue,” he said.
Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, the other airlines that fly A380s fitted with Rolls-Royce’s Trent 900 engines, also briefly grounded their planes last week but resumed services after completing checks.
The Qantas engineers are working with Rolls-Royce, who manufactured and maintains the engines, as well as Airbus.
Rolls-Royce issued a statement Monday claiming progress in finding the cause of the engine failure but it did not elaborate.
Rolls-Royce Group PLC stock rose more than 2 percent to 603.5 pence ($9.74) on the London Stock Exchange after the news. Still, the company’s share price remains about 8 percent lower than it was before the A380’s emergency landing Thursday.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading an international investigation into the blowout on the A380, appealed for help from residents of Indonesia’s Batam island to find a missing piece of a turbine disc.
The island was scattered with dozens of pieces of debris — some as large as doors — when one of the A380’s four engines failed minutes into a flight to Sydney.
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