Hong Kong’s flagship airline, Cathay Pacific, said on Tuesday that it found 15 of its Airbus A350 planes required repair after an engine component failed on a plane headed to Zurich.
Cathay Pacific said it inspected all 48 planes in its Airbus A350 fleet, adding that three of them had been fixed by Tuesday afternoon. It said it has canceled at least 34 round-trip flights since Monday because of the engine issue. All flights were expected to return to operation by Saturday.
The carrier began the inspections after one of its A350 planes took off from Hong Kong International Airport on Monday before it experienced a problem, dumped fuel over the sea for half an hour and had to return to the airport.
Rolls-Royce, the maker of the Trent XWB-97 engine that is used in the A350 planes, said that Cathay Pacific had secured the spare parts needed to replace its components.
Rolls-Royce stock fell 6.5 percent on Monday after it initially said it could not determine what caused the incident. The stock bounced back partly on Tuesday.
“Rolls-Royce will now be in a better position to analyze and determine what the root causes of the failure are and then it will tell Cathay and other operators what should be done next,” said Warren Chim Wing-nin, the deputy chairman of the aircraft division at the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers, a professional organization.
Cathay Pacific did not provide details about the engine component that failed, but it said it was the “first of its type to suffer such a failure on any A350 aircraft worldwide.”
Dozens of airlines around the world use the Airbus A350. In addition to Cathay Pacific, other airlines with the biggest A350 fleets include Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways, Air France, Delta Air Lines and Air China.
Qatar Airways, which has 58 Airbus A350 aircraft, said the operation of its fleet had not been affected but that it was “continuing to monitor any developments.”
None of the other airlines responded immediately to requests for comment.
Chinese news media reported that the Civil Aviation Administration of China was looking into whether it needed to inspect the A350 engines of its domestic carriers, including Air China, China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines and Sichuan Airlines.
Airbus is the world’s biggest plane maker, a coveted position that it has held for five straight years as Boeing, its embattled rival, has faced a crisis over a series of failures with its 737 Max line of airliners.
The engine component failure on Cathay Pacific’s A350 plane on Monday was the second engine incident in three days for the carrier. One of its Airbus A330 planes failed to take off from a runway in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, because of what the company said was a technical problem.
The post Cathay Pacific Finds 15 Planes Need Engine Repairs appeared first on New York Times.
