Airbus A380 (Qantas Flight 32) Engine on Fire - The Titanic In The Sky Seconds from Disaster

• published: 09 Nov 2014
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Qantas Flight 32 was a Qantas scheduled passenger flight which suffered an uncontained engine failure on 4 November 2010 and made an emergency landing at Singapore Changi Airport. The failure was the first of its kind for the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft. It marked the first aviation occurrence involving an Airbus A380. On inspection it was found that a turbine disc in the aircraft's No.2 Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine (on the port side nearest the fuselage) had disintegrated. The aircraft had also suffered damage to the nacelle, wing, fuel system, landing gear, flight controls, the controls for engine No.1 and an undetected fire in the left inner wing fuel tank that eventually self-extinguished. The aircraft was registered in Australia as VH-OQA, and named Nancy Bird-Walton, Qantas' first A380. The failure occurred over Batam Island, Indonesia, on Flight 32 from London Heathrow Airport to Sydney Airport, four minutes after taking off from Changi for the second leg of the flight. After holding to determine aircraft status, the aircraft returned to Changi nearly two hours after take-off. There were no injuries to the passengers, crew or people on the ground; debris from the accident fell onto the Indonesian island of Batam. At the time of the accident a total of 39 A380s were operating with five airlines; Air France, Emirates, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines (SIA) and Qantas. The accident led to the temporary grounding of the rest of the five-plane Qantas A380 fleet. It also led to groundings, inspections and engine replacements on some other Rolls-Royce powered A380s in service with Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, but not in the A380 fleets of Air France or Emirates, which are powered by Engine Alliance engines. The accident, at 10:01 am Singapore Standard Time (02:01 UTC), was caused by an uncontained failure of the port inboard (Number 2) engine, while en route over Batam Island, Indonesia. Shrapnel from the exploding engine punctured part of the wing and damaged the fuel system causing leaks and a fuel tank fire, disabled one hydraulic system and the anti-lock brakes and caused No.1 and No.4 engines to go into a ‘degraded’ mode, damaged landing flaps and the controls for the outer left No.1 engine. The crew, after finding the plane controllable, decided to fly a racetrack holding pattern close to Changi airport while assessing the status of the aircraft. It took 50 minutes to complete this initial assessment. The First Officer (FO) and Supervising Check Captain (SCC) then input the plane's status to the landing distance performance application (LDPA) for a landing 50 tonnes over maximum landing weight at Changi.[10] Based on these inputs the LDPA could not calculate a landing distance. After discussion the crew elected to remove inputs related to a wet runway, in the knowledge that the runway was dry. The LDPA then returned the information that the landing was feasible with 100 metres of runway remaining. The flight then returned to Singapore Changi Airport, landing safely after the crew extended the landing gear by a gravity drop emergency extension system, at 11:45 am Singapore time. As a result of the aircraft landing 35 knots faster than normal, four tyres were blown. Upon landing, the crew were unable to shut down the No.1 engine, which had to be doused by emergency crews 3 hours after landing until flameout. The pilots considered whether to evacuate the plane immediately after landing as fuel was leaking from the left wing onto the brakes, which were extremely hot from maximum braking. The SCC pilot, David Evans, noted in an interview, "We’ve got a situation where there is fuel, hot brakes and an engine that we can’t shut down. And really the safest place was on board the aircraft until such time as things changed. So we had the cabin crew with an alert phase the whole time through ready to evacuate, open doors, inflate slides at any moment. As time went by, that danger abated and, thankfully, we were lucky enough to get everybody off very calmly and very methodically through one set of stairs." The plane was on battery power and had to contend with only one VHF radio to coordinate emergency procedure with the local fire crew. There were no injuries reported among the 440 passengers and 29 crew on board the plane. Debris also fell on a school and houses, causing structural damage, and on a car. The investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau indicated that "fatigue cracking" in a stub pipe within the engine resulted in oil leakage followed by an oil fire in the engine. The fire led to the release of the Intermediate Pressure Turbine (IPT) disc. It also said the issue is specific to the Trent 900. Rolls-Royce determined that the direct cause of the oil fire and resulting engine failure was a misaligned counter bore within a stub oil pipe leading to a fatigue fracture. The ATSB's preliminary investigation report confirmed Rolls-Royce's findings.