Qantas A380s Stay Grounded For Another 72 Hours

[webfact]

Australia's Qantas A380s stay grounded for another 72 hours

SYDNEY, Nov. 8 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Qantas Airways chief executive Alan Joyce said on Monday, the airline's A380 jets will not return to operations for at least another 72 hours.

"Qantas will not return its A380 fleet to service until confident the issues have been identified," Joyce said.

"At this stage, Qantas does not expect to operate the A380 fleet for at least another 72 hours."

Joyce said oil leaks had been discovered in three engines on three different aircraft.

He said Qantas had spare engines to replace the affected engines on the three aircraft - two of which are in Los Angeles and the third in Sydney.

The fleet has been grounded since Thursday when QF32 travelling to Sydney from Singapore was forced to turn back after a mid-air explosion of one of the aircraft's four Trent 900 Rolls Royce engines.

Teams of engineers are conducting engine tests on the A380s, alongside crews from Airbus and Qantas.

Joyce said the focus was still on finding out what caused the explosion on QF32. (Xinhua)

-- TNA 2010-11-08

[nong38]

I think its worth making the point that 20 years ago the plane would not have got back to the air port, this plane circled for 2 hours to dump fuel and landed safely, no injuries, now we have to wait for the inspection and nnot speculate what happened.