Qantas Flight 32

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Qantas Flight 32
Accident summary
Accident type Engine failure
place Batam , Indonesia
date November 4, 2010
Fatalities 0
Survivors 469 (all)
Injured 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type Airbus A380 -842
operator Qantas
Mark VH-OQA
Departure airport London Heathrow Airport
Stopover Singapore airport
Destination airport Kingsford Smith International Airport , Sydney
Passengers 440
crew 29
Lists of aviation accidents
Airbus A380 (VH-OQA) of the airline Qantas taking off from Heathrow

Qantas flight 32 was a flight of an Airbus A380 operated by the Australian airline Qantas , which was en route from London Heathrow Airport to Sydney Airport on November 4, 2010 . Shortly after a scheduled stopover at Changi Airport in Singapore failed an engine and there was a so-called uncontained engine failure ( German uneingedämmtes engine failure ). The plane landed and no one was injured.  

plane

The aircraft was registered in Australia as VH-OQA and was christened in honor of Australian aviation pioneer Nancy Bird Walton , it was Qanta's first A380 of the 842 sub-series. The aircraft with the serial number 014 was delivered on September 18, 2008 and is of four Rolls-Royce Trent 972 powered jet engines.

On the day of the accident, November 4, 2010, there were 440 passengers, 5 pilots and 24 flight attendants on board.

In April 2012 the machine was put back into operation and flew to Sydney on April 22, 2012. The repairs to the damaged wing structure and the hydraulic, pneumatic and electrical systems cost a total of $ 144 million.

procedure

Over the Indonesian island of Batam , engine number two, the inner engine of the left wing, broke at 10:01 a.m. local time (02:01 UTC ), the intermediate pressure turbine disc . Debris had penetrated the engine cowling ("uncontained engine failure") and further penetrated the left wing in four places. Important parts of the landing gear , the wing, the fuel system as well as the control and monitoring systems of engine number 1 (outer left engine) were damaged. In the damaged fuel system in the wing, a fire started in the left wing tank , which probably went out by itself. A fire in the fuel tank damaged a hydraulic system and the anti-lock braking system (ABS).

The plane had taken off from Changi Airport in Singapore just four minutes before the incident. None of the passengers and crew members were harmed. Contrary to initial reports to the contrary, according to the ATSB final report, no persons were injured by falling engine parts on the island of Batam. The pilots decided with the heavy aircraft in holding patterns around 55 kilometers east from Changi Airport to circle, to assess the situation. Due to the damage in the wing, the hydraulic systems only worked to a very limited extent; among other things, the buoyancy aids no longer worked properly and the landing gear had to be extended manually. It took them about fifty minutes to make the final assessment. Because, among other things, the emergency fuel drain no longer worked, the A380 landed after 1 hour and 49 minutes of flight time, 41 tonnes above the maximum total landing weight (MLW) and with a "tilt": There was a weight difference of 10 tonnes between the left and right wing. The supervising check-captain entered the parameters for a landing in Changi into the landing performance application (LPA) on his laptop while preparing for landing, including the maximum total landing weight of the aircraft, the runway data, the weather conditions and a total of nine failed aircraft systems: The non-functioning lift aids on the leading edge of the wing, the limited braking function, the reduced number of functioning airbrakes and the inactive left thrust reverser led to an abnormal landing configuration, which in turn influenced the calculation of the required runway length. For each system that was not available, the LPA added an additional safety margin to the length calculation, i.e. a total of nine times. The calculated required runway length was therefore longer than the available one and the LPA therefore reported "No result". The check captain then recalculated the landing performance data, but used the actual flight weight, which was 41 tons higher. This revised calculation showed that a landing on runway 20C would be possible with a remaining runway length of 100 meters. The pilots decided to land on this basis. After landing, the Airbus came to a standstill 150 m before the end of the runway.

Effects

At the time of the accident , 39 Airbus A380s were in use for five airlines: Air France , Emirates , Lufthansa , Singapore Airlines and Qantas. There were also shutdowns, reviews and engine replacement at Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines on A380 aircraft with Rolls-Royce engines (the same engine manufacturer as on Qantas flight 32). Air France and Emirates were not affected because they were using Engine Alliance engines.

Qantas is currently the only airline that uses the Airbus A380-842 with the slightly more powerful Rolls-Royce Trent 972 engines. When she found oil leaks during an immediate check on three other engines on her A380-842, she banned all of her six A380s from taking off. After a good three weeks, two of them were put back into operation.

examination

The cause of the accident was a wrong bore in an oil feed connection in the turbine of the engine. This caused a fatigue crack, causing oil to leak and self-ignite. This fire caused heat damage to the turbine disk, which lost its power connection to the drive shaft and accelerated to a speed that exceeded its structural capacity. The ( centrifugal ) forces tore the turbine disk into three main parts, which penetrated the engine cowling, which led to further damage. The fatigue fracture was in the turbine bearing between the high and medium pressure turbines of the engine as a result of an off-center bore (the pipe was apparently machined from a solid workpiece through two bores from both ends). According to preliminary findings, EASA names an oil leak in a defective bearing as a source of error. Leaking oil ignited and caused overheating. As a result, a pane broke in the medium-pressure turbine and the debris from the pane broke through the turbine fairing and the wing. This phenomenon, known as an oil fire, was described by EASA in a directive in August 2010 as a possible consequence of an identified increased wear of certain parts in engines of the Trent 900 series. This directive also warned of the possible leakage of parts from the engine. The directive also provided for stricter controls on all engines in this series.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g ATSB final report of June 27, 2013, English, viewed on November 6, 2016
  2. ↑ Description of the incident
  3. ↑ a b Repaired aircraft arrives in Singapore
  4. ↑ Qantas A380 Nancy Bird-Walton returns. ( Memento of the original from November 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.asianaviation.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: asianaviation.com , April 27, 2012, (English).
  5. ↑ Qantas Flight 32 from the cockpit
  6. ↑ A380 has to make an emergency landing with engine damage. In: N24 .de , November 4, 2010, accessed on November 26, 2010.
  7. ↑ Indonesians collect parts from Qantas aircraft ABC News, November 4, 2010
  8. ↑ Gerald Traufetter: Show jumper after the fall. In: Der Spiegel . November 15, 2010, p. 147 , accessed on November 16, 2016 : "One of the two hydraulic systems failed, and important connecting cables were cut, including to the outer engine 1."
  9. ↑ a b Reports - Qantas, Airbus A380, VH-OQA. In: Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) , June 27, 2013,
    "Key Finding: Oil Line Fatigue Fracture", p. 16.
  10. ^ The Anatomy of the Airbus A380 QF32 near disaster. In: blogs.crikey.com.au , November 17, 2010, accessed November 26, 2010.
  11. ↑ Qantas QF32 flight from the cockpit. ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.aerosocietychannel.com archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Aerospace Insight , December 8, 2010.
  12. ↑ Florian Diekmann: Qantas A380 incident: “The most dangerous time was after landing”. In: SpOn / AP . December 10, 2010, accessed on February 15, 2012 : “The pilots decided to ignore this instruction and dare to land with wings of different weights, the weight gradient was ten tons: “ The system with which the fuel can be discharged in the air , had failed and we were 50 tons heavier than the maximum allowable landing weight, " says Evans."
  13. ↑ The Airbus A380 only has a thrust reverser on the inner engines No. 2 and No. 3.
  14. ↑ Airbus A380 Production List. In: planespotters.net , accessed November 10, 2015.
  15. ↑ Airbus does not make any new recommendations for the A380 for the time being. ( Memento of December 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: Handelszeitung , November 8, 2010.
  16. ↑ Guesswork on oil leakage on the Airbus A380 engine. In: Die Welt , November 8, 2010.
  17. ↑ Lufthansa flew two weeks with a breakdown engine. In: Die Welt , December 2, 2010.
  18. ↑ Oil fire is said to have caused engine failure. ( Memento from November 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: faz.net / dpa , November 11, 2010.
  19. ↑ Update: Trent 900 incident on Qantas A380. In: Flug Revue , November 4, 2010, accessed on November 26, 2010.