Recently in Maintenance Category

A Qantas Airways Airbus A380 was forced to take a diversion from its scheduled flight from Singapore to London, due to an oil problem, causing one of its four Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines to shut down.

Flight QF31 flew for around two-and-a-half hours with only three functioning engines before landing safely in Dubai. The aircraft had 250 passengers and 25 members of staff who all disembarked safely.

Avid Twitter user Stephen Fry was a passenger onboard this flight tweeted his reactions: ''Bugger. Forced to land in Dubai. An engine has decided not to play.'' Adding: ''I should in all conscience add that staff are being wonderful & that morale is high and the passengers understanding & cheerful.'' 

He colourfully expressed anger at leaving his wallet on the grounded flight: "I've left my wallet on the sodding plane. Hell's teeth this really isn't my day." 

This isn't the first time Qantas has had engine-related problems. Almost exactly one year ago, in November 2010, a fault in a Trent 900 oil feed tube caused the number two engine of a Qantas A380 to fail, resulting in an emergency landing in Singapore. Oddly similar to today's events.

Qantas isn't having much luck recently, as earlier this week it was forced to ground its fleet due to a dispute with its staff and unions, before resuming limited flights. All of these incidents are continuing to put a strain on Qantas' revenue.

Related blog posts

Airline Business: The Qantas A380 drama - QF32 a year on

Learmount: Handling The Big Jet: the human story of QF32

This post was written by Rebecca Springfield

AgustaWestland is the latest UK defence contractor to announce big job cuts, with up to 375 people to be laid off, largely from its Yeovil factory, in response to reduced helicopter purchases by the UK Ministry of Defence as well as slowing export sales. The exact number of redundancies is yet to be determined, and the company has launched a voluntary scheme to minimise the number of compulsory cuts it will have to make.

The final number will be known in early 2012, following a 90-day consulting period, but could be in excess of 10% of the company's UK workforce of 3,600, including 3,400 at Yeovil.

The move follows BAE Systems' end-September announcement that it was cutting nearly 3,000 UK jobs in response to spending cuts in programmes ranging from the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter to Hawk trainers and Tornado attack jets.

The Finmeccanica division hopes to shift reliance away from defence business with the introduction of its AW169 multi-purpose civil helicopter, which is being readied for delivery from 2015. AW expects to sell 1,000 of the 10-seat models over 25 years, to transport and offshore operators and for law enforcement and surveillance duties.

The AW169 will make its first flight next year, and one of four prototypes will be based at Yeovil, which is focussing its attention on main and tail rotor and transmission development. But the company readily admits that in the short term the Yeovil plant, which assembles the AW101, Super Lynx and AW159 models, will increasingly have to make do with ongoing support activity for the UK armed forces.

And, it has yet to be decided how Yeovil will fit into the AW169 programme once it moves from development into production, and there is no guarantee that the plant will be a mainline production centre. The AW139, for example, is assembled in Italy and the USA, with a third plant soon to come online in Russia.

Managing director Ray Edwards said: "These steps together - the increased civil aircraft work-flow, the launch of the AW169 and the streamlining of the workforce - will place our UK operation on a strong footing and enable us to keep the skills needed for the UK to retain a viable helicopter capability. 

"Our military business remains central to our success. This said, extending our capabilities in civil production and competing for export programmes, both areas where the government has shown considerable support, are the keys to AgustaWestland's future."

Ultimately, AgustaWestland should have plenty of room to grow in civil markets - assuming its product can match the appeal of Eurocopter, which is increasingly a runaway market leader. As the table clearly shows, AW is a solid number two in the UK civil market, and growth appears to be coming at Bell's expense. Globally, AW is the clear number three; again a flagging Bell looks to be providing opportunity to gain ground - but that means grabbing sales from Eurocopter.

Looking in the archive we can see how Flightglobal used to celebrate the festive period. Here are a couple of discoveries.

1942   the second year of lighthearted breaks in the serious business of wartime aviation

2000 Uncle Roger's festive quiz

After Christmas lunch, why not escape more indulgence by putting your aviation knowledge to the test with this year's Unlce Roger Festive Quiz.

A special kind of scrutiny was applied to the European Aviation Safety Agency last week.

On 27 September the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) imported five of the top executives from EASA, seated them behind a long desk facing a packed hall of industry people, allowed them a few words each to update the audience on current issues they face, and then opened the session for about two hours of questions.

This doesn't normally happen to the senior executives in European agencies. So why EASA? And why did the agency's big five - executive director Patrick Goudou, communications head Daniel Holtgen, quality and standardisation director Francesco Banal, certification director Norbert Lohl and deputy head of flight standards Eric Sivel - agree to undergo this public grilling?

It's taken a month to remove the damaged Swiss International Air Lines BAE Systems Avro RJ100 from the runway at London City airport after a heavy landing on 18 August.

Weirdly enough British Airways (BA) is yet again on the receiving end of a public dressing down from the UK's regulatory authorities. This time the Air Accidents Investigation Branch is giving them a very hard time indeed over what it found when it dug down into BA's maintenance empire after a medium-embarrassing incident with a 757 back in 2003.

That comes just a few weeks after the AAIB also jumped on an incident when a BA A319 crew shrugged off a mid-air electronics failure with rather more sang froid than the investigators felt was appropriate. And that was distressingly close to another report which also widened its remit from looking at a panel loss on take-off to several other events that the investigators felt were looking alarmingly like a pattern.

Surprise was also expressed in the business (though not unanimously, and mostly in the USA) when a BA crew flew a loaded 747-400 from Los Angeles to the UK after suffering an engine failure shortly after take-off.

Now all this, remember, concerns an airline with a quite superb safety record and which more or less literally wrote the book on some aspects of safety management - notably the BASIS programme which was in large part the driver for the global spread of the flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) concept that is one of the single most important factors in achieving today's extremely high safety rates in the developed world.

So what's going on? Well, there is no doubt that morale in BA's engineering world has taken a thumping over the last few years and people are not happy there. On the other hand, even those who are yelping the loudest are not alleging that safety has been reduced (well, only the occasional voice, and there's always a couple in any airline.)

Here's my view - commercial aviation in the UK is a) practised by some of the finest exponents of the art in the world and b) is more tightly regulated than just about anywhere in the world. In particular, the AAIB boasts some of the wisest heads in the industry or, to put it another way, some canny old dogs who've seen just about everything.

I confess to love reading AAIB reports. The best of them are drafted with a dryness bordering on irony so that you can practically see the author's fractionally raised eyebrow as he listened to an erring pilot's explanation of his, umm, novel way of flying an ILS.

But when the subject is the multi-billion pound corporation that is BA today, the AAIB, in an ever so gentlemanly way, takes its gloves off. And if you're BA then by far the best course of action is to pay attention, say as little as possible in public, and take some very energetic action indeed in private.

I wouldn't have it any other way. And actually I doubt BA would either.

(You can read the whole report on the 757 here.)

It takes a lot to impress British Airways. Losing all your flight instruments at night, for example, hardly merits a mention. Respect!

So, in this story an A319 crew is climbing out of Heathrow on a clear night when suddenly everything goes dark. No flight instruments at all, a standby horizon that it seems almost certainly wasn't illuminated, and just the external horizon to fly by. No radios either.

Unsurprisingly the captain, aged 53, with 11,800 total hours and 4,000 on-type, coped serenely. When the power equally mysteriously returned after a couple of minutes, he spent 40 minutes in the hold fruitlessly investigating the problem and then pressed on to Budapest.

In Hungary, BA's engineers failed to find a fault and cheerfully put the aircraft back into service. The pilots duly filed a mandatory occurrence report and life carried on much as usual.

When the MOR landed at the CAA however the reaction was less relaxed. Not long after it was at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and not long after that the aircraft was grounded with Farnborough's finest climbing all over the avionics.

I doubt that my mortal flesh is ever in safer hands than when it's securely inside a BA aircraft, and particularly with a 12,000 hour, silver-templed veteran guiding us through the skies - night or otherwise. But I think there will be some debate over this one.