Rolls-Royce Group Plc moved to contain a crisis of confidence in the safety of its engines on Monday, saying progress was being made in finding out what caused last week's blowout on a Qantas Airbus A380 flight. Shares in Rolls reversed losses and rose 3 percent as the group eased fears that the failure of one of the four Trent 900 engines powering the Qantas superjumbo signalled a possible wider problem in its family of Trent engines.
"Rolls-Royce has made progress in understanding the cause of the engine failure on the Trent 900-powered A380 Qantas flight QF32 on 4 November," the company said in a statement, ruling out any link to a Trent 1000 engine test explosion in August. "It is now clear this incident is specific to the Trent 900 engine. As a result, a series of checks and inspections has been agreed with Airbus, with operators of the Trent 900-powered A380 and with the airworthiness authorities," it said.
The company, which has been criticised by newspapers and some analysts for saying little since the incident, responded after Australia's Qantas grounded its fleet of Airbus A380 superjumbos for at least three more days. Qantas, which last week said an engine design flaw could be to blame, said it was investigating oil leaks that might have caused the engine explosion on a Sydney-bound flight. "On three of the engines what we found is slight anomalies - oil where oil shouldn't be on the engines," Qantas Chief Executive Alan Joyce told Australia's ABC radio.
"We're just trying to check what the cause of that would be. These are new engines on new aircraft and they shouldn't have these issues at this stage, so it's given us indication of an area for us to focus into," Joyce said. The incident has weighed on Rolls, which competes with a consortium led by General Electric and Pratt & Whitney in providing the engines needed to power the world's largest airliner. Rolls shares fell 9.7 percent last week but closed up 2.7 percent at 606.69 pence after Monday's progress report.