Booking a holiday? Stay away from Boeing 777's

[Deimos Anomaly]

British Airways, Singapore Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Airlines are to continue flying 777's with Rolls Royce engines that are known to be dodgy.

There is a fix out for them but it will take 18 months to get them all done.

Meanwhile they are to keep flying them, ignoring a very stark letter from the NTSB (sent to the EASA and FAA) which pretty much says the flaw could cause failure of both engines on a 777 "at any time".

The flaw relates to ice building up in the fuel supply and blocking fuel flow. It's what was responsible for the BA plane coming from China that crashed in London about a year ago. In November a Delta Airlines 777 lost power in exactly the same way, though they managed to restart the engines and did not crash.

The airlines mentioned say taking all their Rolls-Royce powered 777's out of service until they're fixed would be impractical. Money before lives as always. BA said they have some Rolls Royce powered 777s and some General Electric powered 777s, but that they "couldn't tell passengers which type of engine was powering their plane" (a lie).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4986529/Planes-will-fly-with-potential...

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/art...

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/get-away-from-the-boeing-...

 

[jkladis]

Dramatic and full of inaccuracies.

There is an Airworthiness Directive requiring the flight manual be revised with the developed procedure to work around creating the icing conditions. It is a rare set of conditions but the AD should prevent it from recurring. This comes from the FAA, who do not print something if they can't stand behind it 100%.

The airlines mentioned say taking all their Rolls-Royce powered 777's out of service until they're fixed would be impractical.

Where is your source for this?

 

[ThunderAeroI]

This comes from the FAA, who do not print something if they can't stand behind it 100%.

Considering that you took the time to quote the AD and still found some way to make that comment; I'm not sure what to think about you. The sheer fact is the FAA print lots of things they have no intention of backing or supporting. Somethings they really like to regulate and then find ways to ensure you don't get the funding you need to make the changes to get into regulatory compliance.

Then there are Advisory Circulars which require Part 139 certified airports to comply with, but since they are non-regulatory and only applied via grant acceptance, they arn't legaly binding. So doing something in the AC actually can get you sued, and to top that off, the FAA wont even help you in court.

The classic example being 14 CFR Part 77.

 

[jkladis]

You seem to have a unique perspective being in that field, no pun intended. I see your point of subjective CFRs.

I'll say my experience with ADs show a demand in strict compliance because they've acknowledged something that gets described as a safety issue. No one gets breathing room to drag their feet in that arena.

 

[Marc]

Dramatic and full of inaccuracies.

There is an Airworthiness Directive requiring the flight manual be revised with the developed procedure to work around creating the icing conditions. It is a rare set of conditions but the AD should prevent it from recurring. This comes from the FAA, who do not print something if they can't stand behind it 100%.

The airlines mentioned say taking all their Rolls-Royce powered 777's out of service until they're fixed would be impractical.

Where is your source for this?

If there was that big an issue with the RR powered 777s then I'm pretty sure their airworthiness certificates would of been revoked until the issue had been fixed (basically what happened with Concorde - the certificate was revoked until mods were made though in that instance even with the mods it wasn't re-instated. Normal procedure is that when the aircraft comes in for schedule maintanence the part would installed.

Looking at the wiki entry on the 777s the RR engines are used in the 777-200, 200ER and 300 (those each model had a choice of RR, P&W or GE and each of the 3 ranges used a different RR engine).

The incident at Heathrow was on 777-200ER.

But to say to avoid the 777 is pretty stupid - I've flown on 2 Air Canada 777-200s without incident in the past month. It's also been over 2 years since the one and only 777 hull loss accident. I was probably safer on the AC flight than on the QANTAS 737 from Adelaide to Sydney.