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Now Boeing 787 Dreamliner delayed by fire on test flight

November 11, 2010
2nd Boeing 787 First Flight

First flight of Boeing 787 No.2: Image via Wikipedia

An electrical fire could have a myriad of causes and does not necessarily have any fundamental design implications, but the Dreamliner does not need further delays even for fairly trivial faults.

The Press Association reports:

Boeing has grounded its test fleet of new 787 passenger jets while it investigates an electrical fire that forced one of the planes to make an emergency landing. On Tuesday, a 787 on a six-hour test flight had to make an emergency landing in Texas after the crew reported smoke in the rear of the plane.

Boeing said it would take several days to analyse flight data and stopped flights for all of its 787 test planes “until we better understand the cause of the incident”. Spokeswoman Loretta Gunter said it is not yet clear how long it will be until test flights resumed. “We don’t have a schedule in mind right now,” she said.

The company plans ground tests on the planes while they are not flying.

Ms Gunter said the fire started in a power control panel in a rear electronics bay on the test plane. Boeing is inspecting the power panel and the area around it to see if other repairs are needed. The fire cut the plane’s electrical power. Boeing said back-up systems including a ram air turbine – essentially a wind-powered generator – functioned as expected.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating Tuesday’s incident and the National Transportation Safety Board is monitoring the situation but has not sent investigators to the scene.

It is the latest setback for a plane that is already about three years behind schedule. Boeing had hoped to deliver the first 787, which it calls the Dreamliner, to Japan’s All Nippon Airways in the first quarter of next year.

“We are committed to finding the cause quickly but will not rush the technical team in its efforts,” the company said.

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Rolls Royce Trent 1000 fix is in place

September 28, 2010

RR Trent 1000 cutaway

On August 2nd a  production standard ‘Package A’ Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engine suffered an engine failure while on the test stand at the company’s Derby, UK facility. The ‘Package A’ engines do not incorporate upgrades planned for the ‘Package B’ engines, which will bring the specific fuel consumption target within 1% of planned spec. The failure – which has been described as an “uncontained failure” – of the Trent 1000 engine, which powers the Dreamliner, resulted in “limited debris being released into the test facility,”
At the time a Rolls-Royce spokesman rejected speculation that the unavailability of the engine that Boeing required was related to the incident earlier this month at one of its test facilities in Derby, England, saying the events were “unrelated,” though he declined to elaborate.

Aviation Week: Rolls-Royce says it is already testing an upgrade to the Trent 1000 engine to mitigate a component problem that caused a failure of one of the turbofans this month. The engine maker suffered a Trent 1000 engine failure this month on a test stand in Derby, England, with the powerplant in a sea-level testbed configuration at high power. The engine suffered an intermediate pressure turbine-related failure because of what is being called an “inappropriate operating regime.”

Rolls officials note that ground and flight trials have not been affected, nor is the miscue expected to affect the larger 787 schedule. Rolls supplies the Trent 1000 to Boeing 787 lead customer All Nippon Airways.

Although some elements of what transpired are understood, a Rolls-Royce official notes that “we are now investigating in detail and have made good progress in understanding the issue.” The company was aware of the issue, so later model Trent 1000 builds already have a fix in place, which is now also being installed on engines built to the earlier standard.

The grapevine as to what transpired on August 2nd points to an oil fire in the high pressure compressor drum leading to a failure of the intermediate pressure (IP) shaft. One industry source says once the IP shaft failed, the mounted IP turbine disk moved rearward, causing its blades to impact the low pressure (LP) turbine inlet guide vanes. The result was the separation of the IP turbine disk, which subsequently spun out of the casing and into the test stand.  The same source adds that the “non-adherence to test procedures” was the root cause of the failure, saying that the “stand crew ran more cold starts in close succession than allowed without purging of fuel and oil that accumulate within the engine in places these fluids are not supposed to be.”

Bloomberg reports today that Boeing delayed the 787’s first delivery last month for the sixth time, saying Rolls-Royce wasn’t going to be able to supply an engine needed to finish flight testing. A $17 million Trent 1000 blew up during testing on Aug. 2, forcing Rolls-Royce to close the plant for repairs to the Derby, England, site used to test engines for the 787 and the Airbus SAS A350.

Dreamliner with RR Trent 1000 engines

Boeing Co. said Rolls-Royce Group Plc has a remedy for the August blowout of a jet engine for the 787 Dreamliner aircraft and the two companies will discuss it in meetings in Seattle this week.

A Rolls-Royce team will brief Boeing on a plan that supports the latest target for delivering the delayed Dreamliner at the beginning of next year, Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Jim Albaugh said. Boeing parked one of its five Dreamliner test jets earlier this month to replace one of its two Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines that had experienced a power surge before takeoff. Albaugh said a fix is already in place to address the issue, which Boeing has said was unrelated to the engine blowout.

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