There was an explosion in an engine on a Qantas Airways Airbus A380 that forced it to perform an emergency landing in Singapore. It is said to be caused by a faulty part or design issue. The engine failure on Thursday marked the biggest incident to date for the world's largest passenger plane, in service only since 2007.
After the incident, Qantas decided to ground all of their A380s, pending safety checks which took 24-48 hours and led other airlines to perform checks on their own A380s. German airline Lufthansa said it had withdrawn an A380 from a flight from Frankfurt to Johannesburg because it did not have enough time to check the engines before departure. Singapore Airlines resumed flying its A380s on Friday. Singapore has the second largest fleet in the world after Emirates.
Prior to this incident the European Union air safety body said it told airlines in August to check for "wear, beyond engine manual limits" on certain type of Rolls-Royce engines fitted to the Qantas jet and other A380s.
Many are worried for the safety of the Airbus A380 after this incident and other small incidents involving the A380. Like for example the Qantas A388 (Airbus A380-800) at London on Dec 4th 2009 that had a nose wheel steering failure.
"A Qantas Airbus A380-800, registration VH-OQA performing flight QF-31 from Singapore (Singapore) to London Heathrow,EN (UK), suffered a nose wheel steering failure while landing on Heathrow's runway 27L. The airplane slowed safely, but could not vacate the runway and needed to be towed to the apron." [avherald]
The Qantas A388 was delayed for 10 hours due to repairs needed to be done to the plane. The airplane had encountered a similiar nose wheel steering problem on July 4th 2009
Sources: avherald.com and in.reuters.com
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