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It was inevitable that there would be an engine incident in the A 380. Yesterday a Singapore airlines flight from France to Asia was returned to Paris after an engine warning lead to one of its four RR Trent 900 engines being shut down. The engine will be changed and the passengers put up in Hotels overnight. The Trent was the launch engine for the A380 and at present 52% of the A380 orders carry the RR engine. The other option is the GE, P&W Engine Alliance GP7000. The RR Trent 900 developed from an earlier version of the highly reliable Trent 500 has a number of advance features including light weight wide chord swept fan blades and Hamilton Sundstrand Fuel controllers.

Given there are four engines on each aircraft and the operators have been doing their best to fly the pants of them it is no surprise that there has been an in flight shut down and in fact one could even say it has been an eagerly awaited event for the voyeurs and pundits of aviation not to mention the industry in general.
Flight SQ333, with a crew of 27 and 444 passengers on board, left for Singapore at 12:35 p.m. yesterday. Two and a half hours into the flight, an engine message to the cockpit prompted a shutdown by the pilot, Singapore Airlines said today. The airline didn’t reveal the cause of the malfunction.

“While the aircraft is able to operate with three engines, the pilots decided to return to Paris as a precaution due to the long flight,” the airline said.

The A380 double-decker jet operated by Singapore is one of 19 in service. The craft is still in Paris, and affected passengers have been put up in hotels until alternate flights out of the French capital are found. The jet is being fitted with a new engine on the ground, the airline said.

The A380 is certified as safe to fly with only three of its four engines, which led the pilot to return to Paris, where trained mechanics and other ground personnel could address the issue, said Eric Heraud, a spokesman for France’s DGAC civil aviation authority. The Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is equipped to accommodate the double-decker, wide-body A380 and is one of 60 airports worldwide that will eventually be certified for the plane, which has a maximum takeoff weight of 1.2 million pounds (544 tons) and a wing area of 845 square meters (9,100 square feet). The plane can fit as many as 853 people in an all-economy class configuration.

France’s aviation authority estimates about one in 10,000 flights operated by the national carrier, Air France SA, suffers a problem with an engine that requires it to land before reaching the planned destination.

Some 16 airlines have ordered A380s, and of the 14 airlines that have already made a choice on engine type, nine have chosen Rolls-Royce.

Rolls-Royce is working closely with the airline to investigate the reasons for the malfunction. The company said the engine has proven highly reliable, with a dispatch rate, or number of times the aircraft has left at departure time, of 99.8 percent.

Singapore began serving the Paris route in June, offering daily connections. The company first began flying A380s in October 2007 as the first customer for the model.

Emirates Airline, the largest carrier in the Middle East, is the biggest customer for the plane after ordering 58. The airline now operates five A380s. Qantas Airways Ltd. has four in service, with another two scheduled for delivery this year and three in 2010.

Air France KLM Group’s Air France is scheduled to take delivery of its first A380 by the end of October, and will fly the plane between Paris and New York’s JFK airport. Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s first delivery was pushed back from 2009 to 2010.

Airbus delivered one A380 in 2007, 12 in 2008, and has committed to delivering 14 this year, after deferrals by several airlines forced it to drop down from 18 units. The company has a total order volume of 200 for the A380.
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