mrkz

Interesting given these planes were each said to have been inspected right after the QF event, with no problems found -- and five days later here we are with the same issue. QF took a lot of flak, but this in my mind vindicates them and shows an appropriately conservative attitude to safety.

MSPeconomist

Television news in the US is reporting this morning that SQ is grounding three of its A380s to change their engines. This agrees with the statement quoted in a privious post from SQ yesterday.

jbcarioca

Interesting that RR apparently just announced today that they are "closing in on" the problem. That was reported on radio news in Rio (MEC) in Portuguese. I have not yet read similar info in English but I'm sure it is there by now.

vbroucek

This also shows that contrary to all the Union's bashing of QF maintenance, it seems that QF engineers are on top of SQ ones... How come, QF discovered the oil and SQ initially did not but now did? Perhaps they got a hint from QF where to look at???

payam81

I don't think the union was bashing the Australian Maintenance, rather off-shore was their target.

Perhaps cause QF and RR took apart the whole thing? The initial inspection probably looked for any major signs of material fatigue, amongst other items, which apparently weren't discovered.

Once RR and QF took the engines apart, obviously they probably discovered something that couldn't be detected going by the regular checklists and pointed SQ to the exact issue. This has nothing to do with competence, rather full access to the entire engine and revising the checklists.

Besides, just cause SQ is swapping engines does not mean they actually discovered something, it could very well be a pre-cautionary and PR related move so they got their bums covered just in case.

No where it's stated they found oil where there shouldn't be on SQ engines! Even when they found oil on QF engines, it wasn't called a catastrophic issue, rather a surprising issue given the age of the engines, hinting that had the engines been older, it would have been acceptable for this oil to appear where they found it.

vbroucek

But they took those three engines apart only after they found something suspicious. They did not tell what and only later admited the oil...

AFAIK, SQ did not take those engines apart to found the oil stains (as reported by Reuters and others), they found it on engines still firmly attached to a/c.

According to Reuters: This makes it even more interesting because it then cannot be based on QF's discovery as you argued above...

vbroucek

I did not say QF Australian maintenance, I said QF maintenance as you can see clearly above...