Sydney:
Qantas Airways will keep its fleet of six Airbus A380s grounded for at least another 72 hours after oil leaks were discovered in the engines of three separate aircraft, the company's chief executive said on Monday. The move comes as investigators worked to pinpoint the cause of a dramatic mid-air explosion that forced a Qantas jetliner to make an emergency landing last week. The grounding of the A380s has delayed dozens of flights and forced Qantas, Australia's largest carrier, to charter aircraft from British Airways to meet the backlog.
Alan Joyce, the airline's chief executive officer, said that engineers working over the weekend had spotted oil leaks in the turbine area of engines on three planes.
The investigation began after a Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine powering one of Qantas' A380s burst apart during a flight from Singapore to Sydney on Nov. 4, scattering wreckage over Indonesia's Batam island. The plane, with more than 450 people on board, landed safely in Singapore.
"The oil leaks were beyond normal tolerances," Mr. Joyce told a news conference. Earlier, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio, Mr. Joyce said investigators had uncovered "slight anomalies, oil where oil shouldn't be on the engines."
"These are new engines on new aircraft, and they shouldn't have these issues at this stage," Mr. Joyce told the ABC. "It has given us an indication of an area to focus into."
Qantas shares fell by as much as 4.2 percent in trading on Monday, but finished the day 2.1 percent lower, closing at $2.83. Shares in Rolls-Royce Group PLC, a London-based aeronautics, energy and defense company, have fallen by more than 10 percent since the Nov. 4 incident.
The two companies are cooperating in the investigation, which also involves the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and the European Aviation Safety Agency, which regulates Airbus and Rolls-Royce. Qantas has vowed to keep all of its A380s on the ground until it is certain the planes are safe to fly.
Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, the two other carriers that use Rolls-Royce's Trent 900 engines in their A380s, also briefly grounded their planes following last week's engine failure. Both airlines have since resumed flights after completing their own investigations.
Nicholas Ionides, a spokesman for Singapore Airlines, said it had not discovered any oil leaks of the kind described by Qantas.
"We completed engine inspections on all 11 of our A380 aircraft and did not find anything of concern," Mr. Ionides said. "The findings of the inspections were reviewed with Rolls-Royce. Our A380 operations are meanwhile continuing as per normal."
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has appealed to Indonesian authorities for help finding a piece of the engine's shattered turbine disc -- a tire-shaped metal plate about 3 feet in diameter.
"The recovery of that disc could be crucial to a full understanding of the nature of the engine failure, and may have implications for the prevention of future similar occurrences," the bureau said in a statement Sunday.
Several pieces of engine debris that were strewn across Batam island have already been sent to Britain for examination, the agency said.
Nicola Clark contributed reporting from Paris.