The other Qantas calamity
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The other Qantas calamity; Dreamliners in limboNovember 18, 2010 ± 12:07 pm, by Ben Sandilands
While the grounded A380s are the headline issue for Qantas, the continued grounding of
the Boeing 787 test fleet after a fire emergency in ZA002 is cause for real concern.
The Dreamliner 787 order Qantas placed in December 2005 was the key to the retiring of
old and increasingly unreliable jets in its fleet, from August 2008.
That infamously didn¶t happen as delay after delay hit the program to build a super light
ultra efficient plastic airliner.
Overnight, Bloomberg reported this analyst assessment which sees the certification
and delivery of the first 787s being pushed back as far as 2012. Even before the in flight
fire emergency occurred in the second of the test fleet 787s, on November 9, there were
authoritative reports pointing to a further delay in what remains the current promise,
that the first jets will be delivered, service legal and service ready, to All Nippon Airways
in the first quarter of next year.
The story needs to be considered in parallel with this most recent Boeing statement on
the incident.
EVERETT, Wash., Nov. 16, 2010 /PRNewswire/ ² While the investigation into the incident
onboard 787 Dreamliner ZA002 continues, Boeing has established a plan to fly two other
aircraft, ZA001 and ZA005, back to Seattle from Rapid City, S.D., and Victorville, Calif.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has reviewed and approved the plans.
ZA001 was undergoing refueling in South Dakota when the incident on ZA002 occurred
and the company decided to forgo additional flights. ZA005 was on r emote deployment
for testing in California.
The flights follow a series of inspections on the airplanes¶ aft electronics bays. No testing
will be performed on the flights.
The team investigating the incident in Laredo has developed a detailed understanding of
the ZA002 incident, though more work remains to complete the investigation. In addition
to the information already released about the incident, data show that:
* The total duration of the incident was less than 90 seconds.
* The fire lasted less than 30 seconds.
* The airplane concluded the event in a configuration that could have been sustained for
the time required to return to an airport suitable for landing from any point in a typical
787 mission profile.
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The team in Texas has completed inspection of ZA002 and has begun to prepare to
install a new power panel and new insulation material. The team also is repairing minor
structural damage that occurred during the event. This damage will be addressed with
standard repair techniques in the airplane structural repair manual. The team is currently
evaluating the timeline for completion of the repair work.
The incident on ZA002 demonstrated many aspects of the safety and redundancy in the
787 design, which ensure that if events such as these occur, the airplane can continue
safe flight and landing.
No decision has been reached on when flight testing of the 787 will resume. Before that
decision can be made, we must complete the investigation and assess whether any
design changes are necessary. Until that time, Boeing cannot comment on the potential
impact of this incident on the overall program schedule.
As Bloomberg andFlightblogger note, the devil is in the detail-or its careful avoidance-
in the Boeing statement.
It doesn¶t say that all of the required systems or structural redundancies required for
certification for service entry performed to those standards during the emergency. Why
doesn¶t it say so?
The very mention by Boeing of possible design changes in its meticulously crafted
statement is alarming. Design changes take time, not just to make, model, draw, specify
and build, but to apply, especially if this requires sections of the jets which no longer
conform to certification standards to be removed from all completed and partially
completed 787s.
A delay of a year would mean Qantas subsidiary Jetstar wouldn¶t receive the first of eight
787-8s until June 2013 (not counting other rumoured delays), and that the 787-9s which
make up 35 of the 50 Dreamliners still on firm order from Qantas would not begin
arriving until 2015.
That is a full seven years later than Qantas planned for in terms of developing Jetstar¶s
international routes, and replacing Cityflyer 767s, which like the airline¶s older 747s, are
becoming liabilities in terms of aged airframe maintenance costs and scheduling
reliability.
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The Anatomy of the Airbus A380 QF32 near disaster November 17, 2010 ± 7:56 pm, by Ben Sandilands
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The Airbus presentation to accident investigators of the damage done to QF32 on
November 4 gives new technical insights into this near disaster involving a Qantas A380with 466 persons on board.
The examination of the damage is far from complete, as the presentation makes clear. It
doesn¶t deal with the other dimensions of this serious incident, which are the loss or
impairment of various systems on the giant airliner, and the emerging difficulties the
crew faced from fuel load imbalance caused by some of those failures.
The diagrams need to be compared to the photos shown later in this report
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One thing needs to be kept firmly in mind. Rolls-Royce the maker of the Trent 900
engine which disintegrated knew about the faults that the current airworthiness directive
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concerning these engines says are likely to have caused an intense oil fire in a structural
cavity in the intermediate pressure turbine area of the engine.
Rolls-Royce had designed and was introducing a fix for the oil leak issues for this into the
engines at its own speed. Qantas was left in the dark. It is fair to suggest that Qantas
needs to review relationships with engine manufacturers in which it pays for power by-
the-hour and leaves much of the maintenance and oversight of those engines to the
designer and manufacturer.
To emphasise the obvious. The interests of the engine maker and holder of the
service agreements are not the same as those of the airline. A carrier might
want to correct and replace inadequate design features to a different, more
urgent timetable that the party that benefits from the support contract, and has
its own brand image to protect.
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Some impact damage was done to underbelly and side of the A380
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The set of graphics shown above were accompanied by a brief written and photographic
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overview of the damage as currently assessed.
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Reviewing these images makes it clear why Qantas was quick, and correct, in grounding
its A380 fleet.
The wing of the jet shows remarkable structural strength in sustaining damage that
might have destroyed the airliners of earlier decades, but the questions as to whethercontrol system revisions are necessary to deal with some of the consequences in terms of
failed hydraulics and fuel imbalance are said to be very actively under consideration.
And the questions concerning the timeliness of the Rolls-Royce responses to a known
problem, and its capacity and willingness to share them with the airlines concerned will
not go away. If the engine maker doesn¶t address them its customers will.