Well, it looks like the Airbus A380 is not having a sweet cruise. Last week, a Qantas Airbus A380 had to make an emergency landing in Singapore, after one of its engine exploded. The engine is a Rolls-Royce Trent 900, and Rolls-Royce has admitted there’s a problem with it.

After this incident, Qantas has stopped operations of its A380 fleet for two weeks, while Singapore Airlines pulled all the Trent 900s from three A380s, and Lufthansa has changed one engine from one of its planes.

However, the reports do not stopped there. As you might or might not know, engines on aeroplanes are intensively designed and tested to adjure to extreme safety measures, and in cases of emergency breakdowns and explosions due to engine failure, the chassis of the engine should be able to contain the emergency. However, it’s not so for the Rolls-Royce Trent 900s. According to Jon Ostrower at Flight Global, “the failure in the number two engine was uncontained, as parts penetrated the wing.”

This happened because the engine is not designed to contain a failure on its entirety. Only the front part can contain the engine’s blades in the case of an explosion, but the rest of the casing is not designed to do so. According to the US National Transportation Safety Board, uncontained disk failure is “mitigated by designating disks as safety-critical parts, defined as the parts of an engine whose failure is likely to present a direct hazard to the aircraft.” Well, all we can say is, the passengers on that particular Qantas aeroplane got really lucky.

SOURCE via Flight Global