Cathay Pacific said on Monday night that it would be grounding some of its state-of-the-art Airbus A350 widebody aircraft to carry out urgent engine inspections after a flight was forced to make an emergency return to Hong Kong.
The five-year-old Airbus A350-1000, which was bound for Zurich, departed from Hong Kong International Airport just after midnight on Monday, but the aircraft quickly entered into a holding pattern at just 9,500 feet over the South China Sea before making an emergency return to Hong Kong due to an engine malfunction.
The airline said that a subsequent inspection of the engine identified a failure of a specific engine component. Engineers then inspected other A350 aircraft and discovered that the same component needed to be replaced on these engines.
The only engine option for Airbus A350 aircraft is the Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engine, which comes in two variants. The XWB-84 powers the smaller A350-900, and the XWB-97 powers the longer A350-1000.
The engine number signifies the the thrust of each engine with thew XWB-84 delivering a thrust of 84 pounds and the XWB-97 delivering a thrust of 97 pounds.
Cathay Pacific is amongst one of the largest operators of the Airbus A350 in the world with 48 of the aircraft currently in its fleet. The airline operates 30 Airbus A350-900 and 18 Airbus A350-1000 aircraft.
In a statement to Bloomberg, a spokesperson for the airline said that some aircraft would be out of service for several days as engineers work to replace the failed components.
So far, 24 flights have been scrapped up to the end of Tuesday.
The Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engine is incredibly fuel efficient but not all airlines have been impressed with its reliability. Last November, the president of Dubai-based Emirates, Sir Tim Clark, even described the Trent XWB as ‘defective’ because of its reliability in desert-like conditions.
Although Emirates has placed orders for as many as 65 Airbus A350-900 aircraft, Clark cited the Trent XWB reliability issues as a reason for not ordering the larger -1000 variant of the aircraft.
Rolls-Royce admits that the engine has challenges working in hot, humid and sandy conditions like Dubai but has denied that the engine is ‘defective’.
