A380 is A-OK, says Emirates

A380 is A-OK, says Emirates

Mind you, they’re hardly likely to call it a flying death trap, are they? Company also reiterates that it has no unfair advantage over Europe airlines, and passenger numbers look good

November 25, 2010 4:05 by Samuel Potter

Kipp knows of a man who used to work at Rolls Royce, making engines for planes. He did it for years, and had utter confidence in the product. So much so, in fact, that he would not travel on a plane that didn’t have a Rolls Royce engine. At all. Ever. Even if he was at the boarding gate, if he looked out of the window and saw that the plane was using another company’s engine, he wouldn’t get on the plane. We’re lead to believe that a number of family vacations turned out to be quite problematic.

So what he made of the news that 40 Rolls Royce engines from the A380 needed to be recalled following an incident on a Qantas flight would be interesting to know. Fortunately, whatever the technical fault is it hasn’t caused any of the planes to crash, but we’re sure he’d be heartbroken to know that his trusted Rolls Royce designers were having trouble.

It’s not something that is worrying Emirates. The UAE’s flagship airline has just inked a deal with Rolls worth $1.2 billion to the UK-based manufacturer. They’ll be maintaining the engines on 50 of Emirates wide-body aircraft, according to Economic Times.

Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, Chairman and Chief Executive, Emirates Airline & Group said: “These agreements will extend the business relationship and strengthen the partnership between the two companies. This will also provide a better platform for effective management of engine life cycle costs and enhanced engine reliability.”

Perhaps they got a good deal for the vote of confidence in Rolls Royce at a time when its shares had taken a battering thanks to the A380 fiasco. Speaking of which, though Rolls will not be maintaining any of Emirates’s A380s (they use a different engine) Emirates are the world’s largest buyer of the A380 and have 76 on back order. Kipp wonders if some of those will be carrying the Rolls engine.

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