European agency orders Rolls-Royce engine inspections

11th Nov 2010 14:13

The Europe Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has ordered airlines to carry out inspections into aero-engineer Rolls-Royce's Trent 900 engines after an engine explosion on a Qantas Airlines plane last week. EASA, which certified the Trent 900 in 2004, said preliminary investigations showed the incident on a flight from Singapore to Sidney last week was probably caused by a fire.'The EASA directive makes it mandatory for airlines operating Airbus A380 aircraft equipped with Trent 900 engines to perform repetitive inspections, a first one within a maximum of 10 flights, then after every 20 flights,' EASA said. 'If any discrepancy is found following these inspections, further engine operation shall be prohibited.'The incident last week prompted Qantas to ground its whole Airbus A380 fleet. More trouble emerged this week when Sinapore Airlines said it found oil stains on one of the engines and said it was taking three planes out of service.