Rolls-Royce suffers fresh wave of troubles with Dreamliner engines
Air New Zealand has been forced to ground some of its flights because of problems with their Rolls-Royce engines, the latest in a long line of issues with the British engineering company’s products.
The airline said there have been “two recent events” with the Trent 1000 engines on its Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. There had resulted in flights being cancelled.
New Zealand’s aviation safety board confirmed it was investigating “engine abnormalities” on the carrier’s aircraft in the past week.
In the most recent incident a 787 was taking off from Auckland when the pilots noticed problems. They shut down the engine and returned to the airport. Another flight earlier this week bound for Buenos Aires experienced similar issues. No one was injured in either event.
Air New Zealand is the latest Rolls customer to suffer problems with the Trent 1000 engines on the 787. Japanese airline ANA first reported issues with Trent 100s in the summer of 2016. The problem was thought to relate to blades in the turbine corroding far earlier than expected, resulting in the engines being shut down. A few weeks later Virgin Atlantic said it was had also experienced similar troubles with its Trent 1000 engines.
Both airlines took aircraft out service for urgent maintenance, causing hundreds of flight cancellations.
Rolls - which has more than 400 of the $10m engines in service - has acknowledged the problems. At the company’s half-year results in August it warned investors to “expect increased activity in second half related to Trent 1000 maintenance programme to address a number of technical issues”.
In response to the latest troubles with Air New Zealand’s engines, Rolls said it was working with the airline to minimise disruption and restore the aircraft to flight status.
A spokesman added: “It’s not uncommon for long-term engine programmes to experience technical issues during their life and we manage them through proactive maintenance. This is the continuation of work which started last year to upgrade Trent 1000 engines to the latest standard.”
