Air France hopes to bring its damaged A380 back into service in January |
| Emilie Drab |
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29 NOV 2017 | 430 words
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© BEA |
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The days of the Air France A380 grounded in Goose Bay are numbered. During a press conference organised by the French association of professional aerospace journalists (AJPAE) on 21st November, Air France's CEO Franck Terner indicated that the airline had obtained authorisation to repair the Super Jumbo which was damaged on 30th September and to bring it back to France.
"Very recently, we obtained the authorisation to carry out repairs and bring this aircraft back. I think that this is going to happen soon, in the coming days or weeks. My objective was to bring the A380 back as quickly as possible to avoid the Canadian winter, but obviously we are bound by the constraints of the investigation", he announced.
The shipping of a new GP7200 to the Canadian air base still needs to be organised to carry out this repair and bring back the damaged engine for analysis. The BEA which is in charge of the investigation had already indicated in October that the engine is too be delivered to a GE site in Cardiff where investigators would then be sent for the necessary analyses. As for the A380 F-HPJE, it will also be sent there for the final reconditioning work. "There's not much damage to the actual aircraft itself, so there's not a lot of repair work to be done", confirms Franck Terner.
"I think that it will be brought back into service at the start of January - we don't know the date yet as we need to finish assessing the repairs. At any rate, I hope that this will be the case as we have managed to organise ourselves, but if it were longer then things would start to be a bit trickier ". The maintenance line had been reorganised to counter the deficit in capacity generated by the grounding of the A380 until the start of the year.
Franck Terner also emphasised that the GP7200 inspections on the Air France fleet had been carried out even before the publication of the FAA's airworthiness directive in October and that no observations had been made. The airline was in perfect step with the other operators in the Engine Alliance.
The A380 registered F-HPJE had experienced an un-contained failure of its No. 4 engine which had caused the fan to break-up while it was flying over Greenland at FL370, en route to Los Angeles. The crew decided to perform an emergency landing at Goose Bay (Canada). The investigation to determine the circumstances surrounding the accident is continuing. |
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Emilie Drab
Assistant editor
Civil aerospace, Air transport
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