Airline passenger news and views

I have kept a bit quiet about the problems faced by Rolls-Royce with their Trent 900 engine.  I have certainly not wanted to fan the flames nor could I offer any sensible comments. 

The company took the same line and, sadly, have been criticised for it. Perhaps we are so used to instant news and instant inane comment that we no longer regard it as necessary to discover the facts before responding.

Rolls-Royce (or Royce’s as it should be known for its engineering founder) make a very complex product.

This is not some mass-produced car engine, a Trent 900 engine is the result of 40 years of development of the RB-211 family of engines and each component, screw and bolt is individually engineered.

Non-engineers would laugh at the idea of personality in inanimate objects but you can bet that every component of the fated engine ‘belonged’ to someone who had either designed it, made it or installed it. World Class engineering is like this and Royce’s epitomises the best of the best.

Clearly, the engine failed in such a dramatic way that turbine blades broke from the engine and failed to be contained by the engine casing.  This is the worst case scenario.

Single engine failure is acceptable in as much that multi-engine aircraft are designed to cope. Having engine debris cut through the wing, control surfaces and hydraulics is unacceptable and highlights the seriousness of the failure.

The Trent 900 is probably the most advanced aero engine in the world. The GE- Pratt and Whitney joint venture is up there in the battle of technology leap-frog but the Trent 900 is the engine of choice for the A380. The technology behind all of these engines is mind-blowing and the tolerances are microscopic.

So, what went wrong? Royce’s say that they have identified the event sequence and the component area in which the problem started. Thousands of hours of technical analysis will have gone into that one bland statement. Many more hours will go into defining and refining a solution and many hours after that will go into re-testing.

Do we continue to trust Rolls-Royce? Damn right we do. 

These are complicated and difficult problems. Politicians, press pundits and commentators cannot help us here. We need the experience of down-to-earth engineers who have the credentials and ambition to be the best in the world.