TRANSCRIPT

Program Transcript

Read the transcript of Sarah Ferguson's report "QF 32", first broadcast Monday 28 March 2011.

Reporter: Sarah Ferguson

Date: 28/03/2011

KERRY O'BRIEN: "One spark and we were cinders." QF32 from Singapore to Sydney - the story in which anyone who's ever flown or is ever likely to fly has an investment.

Welcome to Four Corners.

The familiar red and white kangaroo stamped across the Qantas fleet is much more than a clever business logo. It's become a symbol that stands for safety in the skies. But when that logo was blown off with the engine cowling of QF32 in a midair explosion and crashed onto an Indonesian island off Singapore one morning in November last year, the airline's unparalleled safety record nearly went with it.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigation is not due to report until later this year, but already the finger of responsibility for the near calamitous mishap has been pointed at the door of another famously iconic brand – Rolls Royce. Qantas is now suing Rolls Royce.

There are two stories in play here tonight. One is the investigation of what went wrong; the other a tale of remarkable courage and cool under immense pressure, and of passengers who also kept their nerve. What you're about to see includes pictures filmed on board by passengers as the drama unfolded, as well as carefully constructed recreations with the cooperation of the flight crew, Qantas staff in Sydney, various teams at Singapore Airport and the passengers. Rolls Royce chose not to participate in any way.

Here now is Sarah Ferguson's account of what happened on QF32 that day.

SARAH FERGUSON, REPORTER: Singapore, November 4th, 2010. At 7:00am Changi Airport was gearing up for the busiest part of the day.

DAVE EVAN, CHECK CAPTAIN: It was a beautiful day. Sun was shining, pleasant temperatures, calm winds.

TONY TANG, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, CHANGI: Temperature was about 29 degrees Celsius. The wind was about southerly at five knots.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY, PILOT IN COMMAND: The conditions were perfect to go flying.

SARAH FERGUSON: QF32 had just touched down from London. It had a two hour turn round before take-off to Sydney. The A380 - the largest passenger aircraft in the world, powered by four Rolls Royce engines to lift 465 tonnes of machinery and people into the air.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: It is the latest technology, it's the derivation of 100 years of aviation, and it is a superb machine to fly.

SARAH FERGUSON: Twenty-nine fresh crew members were heading in to man the flight to Sydney. Neither captain Richard de Crespigny nor first officer Matt Hicks was originally scheduled to fly that day.

MATT HICKS, FIRST OFFICER: Some first officer had gone sick or gone home and just the ensuing disruptions meant that I had to do that service.

SARAH FERGUSON: A small army of cleaners were hurried off the plane as the cabin crew prepared for the arrival of 440 passengers.

MICHAEL VON RETH, CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGER: It was such a normal day. Our call time, the briefing, on the bus to the hotel, get the briefing from the airport staff and then get onto the aircraft, did our checks, there was no- there was no fluke, there was nothing missing.

SARAH FERGUSON: Downstairs in the terminal, the passengers were checking in. Rosemary and Larry Hegarty were on their way home to Sydney after two months with family in Ireland.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY, PASSANGER: I'm leaving family, I'm leaving my sisters there but then my family's here, my boys and my husband are here, so it's always a great pull for me as to where I want to be.

ULF WASCHBUSCH, PASSANGER: Check in was very quick. I headed through, had a coffee on the way. I was actually Tweeting to let my friends know that I'm, you know, I'm off to Australia.

SCREEN TEXT: "On my way to Australia for the first time and first time on A380!"

SARAH FERGUSON: This plane was particularly special, named after Australia's most famous female aviator, Nancy-Bird Walton.

ALAN JOYCE, QANTAS CEO: Well the Nancy-Bird Walton is a very special aircraft, the first aircraft we took delivery of. You had this iconic brand in Qantas, you had an iconic aircraft in the A380 and you had an iconic engine manufacturer in Rolls Royce.

SARAH FERGUSON: The plane had an extra significance for first officer Matt Hicks. Nancy-Bird Walton wrote his reference when he joined Qantas as a cadet. On the tarmac, QF32 took on 106 tonnes of jet fuel. Second officer Mark Johnson did the final physical check of the plane.

MARK JOHNSON, SECOND OFFICER: You start at the front of the aircraft around the nose area. You have a look at the tyres for damage, you look through, look through the engines, along the wings looking for damage.

SARAH FERGUSON: The four Trent 900 engines bolted under the wings looked brand new.

MARK JOHNSON: There was nothing, nothing unusual I saw on that day at all to warrant mention.

SARAH FERGUSON: There was something unusual about this flight - the number of pilots in the cockpit and their combined experience. In addition to the normal crew of three there were two extra captains in the rear seats, conducting routine checks on the pilots.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: I had the three crew members, Harry checking us, and he'd be quiet. Dave was there to actually train Harry on how to be a check captain. So we had a check captain checking a check captain who was checking me.

MATT HICKS: They just sit in the back but, you know, it's like having a copper sitting in the back seat of your car. You, you know, you're crossing every t and dotting every i. I tried to make it a bit light-hearted as we went out and, it's a pity it's not on the cock-pit voice recorder actually, I said to Rich just before we took off, he said to me, happy? Everyone happy? I said, yep, just don't crash (Laughs).

SARAH FERGUSON: Just before 10:00am QF32 moved towards runway 2-0 centre.

TONY TANG: I was thinking that everything would be smooth, you know, and I think every air traffic controller hopes for that.

MIKE TOOKE, PASSANGER: There's a camera on the tailplane, so you can see the aircraft taxiing out, get to the end of the runway.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: I just am totally relaxed because I loved flying.

SARAH FERGUSON: They had every reason to feel confident. An airline with a unique safety record, flying the most sophisticated civilian aircraft, powered by engines made by the world's most famous engine maker. Four Rolls Royce engines, each delivering 72,000lb of thrust to lift the massive aircraft almost noiselessly off the ground.

SARAH FERGUSON: At one minute past 10:00am, five minutes after takeoff, the plane was in a comfortable climb.

MIKE TOOKE: Sound travels slower than light, and you can actually see things before you hear them and I can remember seeing this flash of white go off the inner engine. And at first I thought it was just a puff of smoke, but then there was an incredibly loud bang and the whole plane started to vibrate.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: There were two loud noises. It was like boom, boom.

ULF WASCHBUSCH: I saw something flying out of the aircraft wing. It's hard to tell what it was 'cause it was very fast.

MICHAEL VON RETH: The wing all of a sudden, the surface opened up and debris flying forward and sparks forward, and, but it went with such a speed, you can't follow with your eyes.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: All you could see was the smoke and little bits of black debris coming flying out. And I just looked at Larry and I said, do you think it was birds that we hit? Do you think we're going to be alright?

LARRY HEGARTY, PASSANGER: The next thing I did was just say a couple of quick prayers.

MIKE TOOKE: And then within about five seconds it felt as if we were plunging out of the sky.

SARAH FERGUSON: Were you scared?

MIKE TOOKE: Very scared indeed.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: I immediately went to level the aircraft, which would serve to bring the thrust off the engines and to make everything less severe.

SARAH FERGUSON: Emergency warnings were sounding in the cockpit.

MATT HICKS: I had my thumb up most of the time just cancelling the bells. You can't think with a bell ringing on top of your head.

DAVE EVANS: I stood up and looked over Matt's, the first officer's seat, to discover that we'd had an engine failure which is what I was expecting to see but what I wasn't expecting to see was two other engines in less than normal condition.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: We pulled up a screen to show us all the sensors on engine two and they were all crossed. When I saw that, I thought something has blown all the sensors off that engine.

MATT HICKS: We just turned left and went up towards the north, back towards the field because, you know, in that scenario, I mean I thought we could end up in the water.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: There was a girl sitting on the aisle seat opposite me and she had a little baby, and she looked at me and she said, what's wrong? And I said, I think something's happened to one of the engines, but it's alright, we've got three other engines and I'm sure we can land on one engine.

SARAH FERGUSON: Is that what you were thinking?

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: No, not at all. I'm thinking if that's black debris that's coming out of the plane, if it hits the fuselage we're gone, so we are.

MICHAEL VON RETH: What shot through my head straightaway is you have one choice only and there's no way back. Either you get an uncontrollable cabin with panic, fear and aggression, or they sit back and just trust you and follow your instructions and go with you.

SARAH FERGUSON: Senior check captain Dave Evans made the first of a series of announcements from the flight deck.

DAVE EVANS: I do apologise, I'm sure you are aware we have a technical issue with our number two engine. We have dealt with the situation. At this stage everything is secure, aircraft is flying safely.

LARRY HEGARTY: They just kept emphasising that they've trained for all this, they train for it every three months, they spend hours and hours in the simulator. Yeah, that helped. That helped tremendously.

SARAH FERGUSON: It may have been reassuring but it wasn't completely true. No one trains for the comprehensive shut down of systems the crew were now experiencing in the cockpit. First officer Matt Hicks watched a series of alert messages – known as ECAM – appear on the screens in front of him, each listing damage to a different aircraft system and each demanding a response.

MATT HICKS: The system prioritises the messages as best it can. We had 50 something, 58 messages or something individual ECAMs and there was way more subsystem faults that weren't displayed. It just felt like it wouldn't end you know, you know, it just kept going and going and going.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: Checklist after checklist, so we had engine and then we had fuel system and flight controls and electrics, hydraulics, pneumatics, landing gear, breaks, auto-thrust, air-conditioning.

MARK JOHNSON: Matt Hicks is a, you know, a very competent operator with 15 or so years in Qantas having flown a 767, 747, A330 and A380 and he was working I would say close to his limit. And I would not have liked to have seen someone with very low hours trying to do that job on that day.

SARAH FERGUSON: The same messages had flashed up at the Qantas Operations Centre in Sydney where the fleet is monitored 24 hours a day.

(Dramatic recreation)
QANTAS MAINTENANCE OPERATIONS WORKER: They all appear to have popped up at the same time.
ALAN MILNE, QANTAS HEAD OF MAINTENANCE OPERATIONS: Okay so that's about 10 minutes ago.
QANTAS MAINTENANCE OPERATIONS WORKER: Yeah, exactly right.
(End of recreation)

ALAN MILNE: Amazing messages, messages like we'd never seen before, both quantity and severity.

(Dramatic recreation)
ALAN MILNE: Spoken to the crew yet?
QANTAS MAINTENANCE OPERATIONS WORKER: No the aircraft hasn't called yet.
(End of recreation)

SARAH FERGUSON: But they couldn't talk to the crew. After the explosion, satellite voice communication had been cut. Only a VHF signal relayed from Singapore told them the plane's location.

TONY TANG (Recreation): Station one, Changi manager, Qantas 32, airborne 0153 reported call, engine number two problem.

SARAH FERGUSON: The pilots' only direct contact with the ground was with Air Traffic Control in Singapore.

TONY TANG: The pilot wanted to remain within 30 miles of Changi Airport in case he needed to land quickly.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: As a gut instinctive reaction, I thought in the worst case we might lose all the systems and I just have to safeguard this aircraft in the most simplest way, and the way to do that is to get within gliding range of Singapore.

SARAH FERGUSON: The operations team, crowded around their computers, could see the situation was more dangerous than an engine failure.

ALAN MILNE: It's tense. There's no two ways about it. We knew there must have been some sort of mechanical damage and therefore debris had been released from that engine so it's the mechanical damage to the rest of the aeroplane that we start getting concerned about.

SARAH FERGUSON: Passengers and crew with a view of the wing could see where the debris had ripped through

ULF WASCHBUSCH: I saw from my seat two relatively large holes. One hole looked like a human body could fit through it, actually, in size, and you could see, you know parts of that wing being bent outside.

SARAH FERGUSON: Mark Johnson went back to the cabin to take a look

MARK JOHNSON: One was more like a gash mark and the other one was quite a largish hole where you know, clearly a projectile had just been punched up through the wing.

MICHAEL VON RETH: The cowling was gone and the rear of the engine was all smashed and damaged, and the wing was damaged and we could see we were losing fuel. And then when my colleague had a look, the kangaroo has gone. I knew that was an uncontained engine failure.

SARAH FERGUSON: Pieces of the engine rained down on the main city of Batam Island in Indonesia.

SARAH FERGUSON: While the plane was still in the air, pictures of large pieces of the aircraft on the ground began appearing on television. Twitter messages spread claiming that a Qantas plane had crashed. The mistaken tweets were quickly reported as news. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce was in his car in Sydney.

ALAN JOYCE: Our investor relations people who were with me at the time said our share price is collapsing. We then did a ring around to find out why. Some of the shareholders had picked up from social media, and that was being reported, that a Qantas aircraft had crashed in Indonesia.

SARAH FERGUSON, QANTAS REGIONAL GENERAL MANAGER, SE ASIA: Nick McGlynn - the Asian regional manager for Qantas - got a call in Singapore.

NICK MCGLYNN: I had a call from our manager in Indonesia. He'd had a phone call from Batam saying there were parts of an aircraft falling from the sky and they looked like Qantas parts and there was suggestions that it possibly had crashed. When you do get that phone call though, your heart stops and you think, my god, what has happened here?

SARAH FERGUSON: In the operations centre Alan Milne knew the plane hadn't crashed but he'd had reports that children may have been killed by falling debris.

ALAN MILNE (Recreation): Yeah, they're saying wreckage with the kangaroo tail.

The delay until we confirmed that there was no fatalities was an enormous period of time in my life, yeah.

SARAH FERGUSON: At the Elisadai primary school, a piece of the engine had crashed through the roof.

JOSEPH, TEACHER, ELISADAI PRIMARY SCHOOL: Suddenly I heard something very hard explosion, like that boom! Something like that. I still not realise what is it I just try to catch and so hot and at that time I know that that's from the aeroplane.

SARAH FERGUSON: It fell only centimetres from a 5-year-old boy at his desk.

TONY TANG: Batam Air Traffic Control informed us that some aircraft parts were found by residents of Batam Island. We immediately conveyed this information to the pilot.

SARAH FERGUSON: Circling above the water, the captain had no time to think about what had happened on the ground.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: I was aware that it was there, but I can't affect that. There's nothing I can do. So you just face the enemy in front of you.

SARAH FERGUSON: He was trying work out if he could land the plane safely.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: You must be stressing I know down the back, there was a bit of a noise, but we have the most modern aircraft, commercial aircraft ever built. To guide us through the check list we need to configure the aircraft to land.

SARAH FERGUSON: Matt Hicks took a brief pause to prepare.

MATT HICKS: I actually had a swig of water 'cause I was getting bit dry in the throat. Thought about my wife and kids for a while; thought I better do a decent job here otherwise I'm not coming home.

SARAH FERGUSON: The pieces of disc that blew out of the engine severed two separate bundles of wiring responsible for many of the landing controls.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: We have lost some spoilers and we've lost the leading edge slats and we have 50 tonnes over our max landing weight, half the brakes, anti-skids inoperative on some of the brakes.

SARAH FERGUSON: Fuel was still pouring from a puncture in one of tanks

MATT HICKS: The fuel system, you know, it was a mess.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: We had lost fuel on the left hand wing. The left hand wing ended up being up to 10 tonnes lighter than the right hand wing.

SARAH FERGUSON: When Dave Evans made the calculations for the landing, the computer told him it wasn't possible.

DAVE EVANS: With the amount of failures that I'd entered, which was around 10 from memory, it was unable to make a calculation. It couldn't calculate if we could stop basically on the runway.

SARAH FERGUSON: Changing parameters, he tried again and came up with the slimmest of margins.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: Out of a four kilometre runway, we had 3,900 metres that we would need. We had a 100 metres surplus.

SARAH FERGUSON: At 4,000 ft the Captain checked his control of the plane for the last time.

MATT HICKS: The hard thing for Rich was managing the speed. We couldn't be fast, if we came in fast we'd overrun. We couldn't be slow otherwise we'd just drop out of the sky.

HARRY WUBBEN, TRAINING CHECK CAPTAIN: I told him the speed was critical, that he had to maintain the speed, which he knew.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: And I thought, well thanks, Harry, that's, you know, that's an understatement.

SARAH FERGUSON: The cabin crew were briefed for landing.

MARK JOHNSON: I explained pretty, pretty frankly the state of the aircraft and that we, we had sufficient runway, albeit with a slim margin, but they should prepare themselves of a potential overrun.

MIKE TOOKE: And I can remember overhearing him say, it's going to be a very fast landing... and the air stewardess's eyes bulged at that comment.

SARAH FERGUSON: Just after 11:40 Air Traffic Control cleared QF32 for final approach.

TONY TANG (Recreation): Ops commander, Singapore tower. Qantas 32 eight miles final, runway 2-0 centre.

SARAH FERGUSON: And alerted emergency services.

DUTY MANAGER, CHANGI FIRE DEPARTMENT (Recreation): Qantas 32... Engine on fire, engine on number 2 is on fire? Okay let me contact the air commander.

SARAH FERGUSON: Fire commander Huang Weikang scrambled his team. They had less than 60 seconds to get into their trucks out to the runway.

HUANG WEIKANG, FIRE COMMANDER, CHANGI: I saw the aircraft coming to land, and the more fuel was gushing out. It's pretty- it's a very bad situation, I would say.

TONY TANG: Aircraft on the final and fuel streaming from the wing, I think I've not seen that in my last 26 years.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: We were coming very, very fast, very fast. And the cabin shuddered, was shuddering the whole time, because I just kept saying to Larry, Oh Larry we're just, we're coming too fast, we're coming too fast.

SARAH FERGUSON: At 11:47 the wheels touched down.

MATT HICKS: The nose bucked up, which we were anticipating.

LARRY HEGGARTY: As soon as we hit the ground, as soon as we landed, the plane just veered slightly to the right and then... and I thought this is not... this is not good.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: I had to get the nose wheel down as quickly as possible, because if I put the brakes on with the aircraft nose up, the wheels that didn't have anti-skid would explode in about half a second.

MATT HICKS: The auto-brake system had malfunctioned. So he had his feet on the brakes manually breaking the aeroplane.

ROSEMARY HEGGARTY: Just didn't seem as if we were slowing down, we were just going such a high speed the whole time. You would never have thought we were going to be stopped at all.

MATT HICKS: I was actually hassling Rich, telling him to brake. You know, I called it a couple of times, I said brakes, you know brakes, and he said, I am, and I said no, get into it and he said, I am and I put my foot up, feet up on the pedals to make sure he did have his feet flat to the floor and they were, there was nothing left there.

HUANG WEIKANG: It looked like it wasn't going to stop. And they only had about 100 metres left of the runway.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: I wanted to get to those fire crews as quickly as possible. The fire engines were all waiting just off the runway, I could see them all, and I wanted to be right next to them. They were my friends.

MATT HICKS: There's an enormous sense of relief when it when it pulled up and we parked the brake.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: Everybody just clapped. It was just sheer, sheer relief even though as I say, it was a bumpy landing, but it was just sheer relief.

ULF WASCHBUSCH: People were calling their loved ones, texting their loved ones to say that they're alive, that we made it.

MATT HICKS: I remember thinking okay, we made it, good, you know job done. But it wasn't. It just changed.

SARAH FERGUSON: The passengers and crew were no safer on the ground than they had been in the air.

HUANG WEIKANG: En route to the aircraft we saw the fuel and we could see a lot of grey smoke coming from the undercarriage wheels. At that stage it was very dangerous. You have fuel, you have hot brakes and they were in very close proximity.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: Those brakes when we stopped are indicating going up through 900 degrees Celsius. To see 900 degrees when we've stopped means these brakes are beyond white hot.

MICHAEL VON RETH: I got a bit tense, seeing the enormous amount of fuel falling, not flowing, falling out of that wing onto the runway, and within less than a minute we were covered. So I was trying desperately over the phone to get the captain. It just didn't work. It didn't work. All bells and whistles went off, but I couldn't get the captain.

SARAH FERGUSON: The flight crew was on the radio to the fire commander.

DAVE EVANS: Matt urgently asked him to start laying foam and he advised us at that point that we still had an engine running.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: They said, you must shut down the engines. And we said, we have. And they said, no you haven't. So in frustration I slammed open the left hand window, and put my head out the window, and I think I expressed an expletive, and said, engine number one is still running.

SARAH FERGUSON: The captain sent a coded message via the public address to the cabin crew to stand by for evacuation. If there was fire all 440 passengers would have to be off the plane in 90 seconds.

MICHAEL VON RETH: When you get a message like that, you know that the emergency is still not over.

HUANG WEIKANG: There's a lot fuel leaking out, we were worried that the engine was a possible ignition source.

CAROLYN JONES, PASSENGER: It didn't take much imagination at all to work out that one spark and we were cinders.

SARAH FERGUSON: Carolyn Jones reached over and held her husband's hand.

CAROLYN JONES: We both thought we've had a great life together, we've got a fantastic family and if this is how it's going to end, then so be it.

HUANG WEIKANG: We tried using water but that didn't work.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: There were just absolutely buckets of water, just hosing the water, humungous amounts of water. And it would stop and then it'd start again.

ALAN MILNE: Unfortunately these engines are designed to fly through extreme rain conditions and no amount of water that we put down the front of that engine would actually shut it down.

SARAH FERGUSON: It was an hour before the situation was stabilized enough to take the passengers off the plane.

ULF WASCHBUSCH: It was one of the best moments to see the open door and walking down that stairwell back in Changi. I was thinking of kissing the ground.

ROSEMARY HEGARTY: There was an engineer that had actually worked for Trent, the engine company, I was talking to him. He was from Sydney and he had worked for them and he said, did you see that? He said, that should never have happened, that engine, it should be always be a contained explosion.

SARAH FERGUSON: The engine was finally extinguished with foam. The pilots now had the chance to see the damage for themselves.

DAVID EVANS: Oh it was total shock. Unbelievable, it was unbelievable. To look at that engine and up close was just gobsmacking is the only way to describe it.

MATT HICKS: I didn't expect the whole back of the engine to not be there. I mean the only thing holding the back section of the engine on was the shafts, the turbine shaft. I mean, look the whole intermediate pressure turbine was gone. To look underneath and still see fuel leaking out of the fuel tanks and just walking around, it was actually a bit surreal. There's all this, you know, retardant foam blowing around through the air and I'm just sort of wandering around under the plane and fuel leaking everywhere and it, it's weird.

SARAH FERGUSON: In the terminal captain Richard de Crespigny spoke to his passengers for the last time.

RICHARD DE CRESPIGNY: Someone said, well what is going to happen to the 380s? And I said, well this aircraft will get repaired and it will take a while, but repaired and come back to service. And someone said, no, the fleet has been grounded. And I said, no, I don't think it has. And they said, yes, it's on CNN now! And at that point I looked up and the story of this flight was on the monitors in the waiting lounge and there was a conference with Alan Joyce.

ALAN JOYCE: We will suspend those A380 services until we are completely confident that Qantas safety requirements have been met.

SARAH FERGUSON: At Changi Airport, the plane was secured for the arrival of the investigators and towed into hangar six.

MARTIN DOLAN, AUSTRALIAN TRANSPORT AND SAFETY BUREAU (ATSB): We in fact had a decision to investigate and a team of four people heading for Singapore before the aircraft had even landed in Singapore.

SARAH FERGUSON: New pictures from Batam provided the first significant clues. A section of the turbine disc had been recovered.

ALAN MILNE: It was a shock, it was a shock to us. In the history of Qantas, in fact the history of Rolls Royce triple spool engines they have never had an uncontained disc failure so to see that disc segment on the ground was a major shock to us.

SARAH FERGUSON: The 200kg disc had burst into three pieces inside the engine

ALAN MILNE: One was straight up through the top of the wing, which we think then exited up and aft of the aircraft. Another one went horizontally across the bottom of the aeroplane and cut through the belly and the wiring and some of the system components that were in there. And a third piece came almost straight up, which damaged this leading edge flap droop nose. The trajectory of one of the main bits coming up through here actually cleared the fuselage, which was good.

SARAH FERGUSON: Lucky or good?

ALAN MILNE: It was lucky. We prefer it not to hit the fuselage because it's not designed to take an impact like that.

SARAH FERGUSON: The disc had a blue tinge around the edge where it had shattered

ALAN MILNE: This is where we started to narrow in on the fact that it was probably an internal oil-fed fire.

SARAH FERGUSON: And did you have any idea what could have caused that at that stage?

ALAN MILNE: At that stage we didn't. We know that that's in the area of one of the bearings in the engine so we were assuming that it was something to do with the oil supply to that bearing compartment.

SARAH FERGUSON: With the investigation barely under way, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce made it clear that Rolls Royce was to blame.

ALAN JOYCE: This is an engine issue and the engines were maintained by Rolls Royce since then they've been installed on the aircraft. We believe that this is probably most likely a material failure or some sort of design issue that we're tracking through and trying to understand.

SARAH FERGUSON: Did you then expect that Rolls Royce would go into the public arena and talk about their role in the event?

ALAN JOYCE: We did, we were asking Rolls to make statements, to get out there, so it was a continuous process.

SARAH FERGUSON: At their engineering head quarters in Derby, Rolls Royce refused to make any public comment. Their version of damage control was to say nothing.

ALAN JOYCE: We were not happy with the way they handled the public relations around this. Rolls Royce's PR strategy was that they were better not communicating to the general public, they believed, and they honestly believed that BP made a mistake in being out there in the public. We believe BP made a mistake by saying the wrong things in the public and our view was that we had to be continuously out there with the facts and information.

SARAH FERGUSON: Behind the scenes, Rolls Royce engineers faced two urgent questions, what had caused the mid air explosion and could it happen again? Rolls Royce instructed all the airlines using its Trent 900 engines to search for oil leaks. Minor leaks were found in 45 engines around the globe; Rolls Royce ordered all of those engines to be changed.

ALAN MILNE: That was probably an engine movement, a global engine movement like we've never seen before I'd suggest.

SARAH FERGUSON: In Singapore the investigators worked their way to the section of the engine that had caught fire. Ben Nichols was part of the investigation.

BEN NICHOLLS, QANTAS ENGINEER: They took some time to get to it because it's sort of buried in the engine a bit. We had to take off large components of the engine to free it up.

SARAH FERGUSON: They zeroed on the end of the oil feed tube called a stub pipe.

BEN NICHOLLS: We had a great view of the stub pipe and it was at that point in time that we saw indications that said that this stub pipe had possibly failed before the event and that was a big moment because they're the things you're looking for in an investigation.

MARTIN DOLAN: I would say that it's close to the crucial moment of the investigation.

SARAH FERGUSON: The pipe carried oil to cool and lubricate bearings in the engine. But the pipe cracked, spilling oil into the hottest part of the engine, igniting a fire which softened the arm connected to the large metal turbine disc. The disc started to free wheel, then accelerated, broke into pieces and fired out of the engine faster than the speed of sound.

SARAH FERGUSON: Rolls Royce had drilled the end of the stub pipe to make room for a filter but they hadn't drilled straight.

MARTIN DOLAN: It became clear that that drilling had not happened straight down the line of the pipe; it had been offset leading to the weakness in the wall of the pipe.

SARAH FERGUSON: Flexing under pressure at take off, especially on the short runway at Los Angeles with a full load of passengers and fuel, the pipe formed a fracture.

(To Alan Milne) So in a sense, this one thin walled pipe was waiting to break?

ALAN MILNE: Yeah, yeah, that's probably one way of putting it. Now we know that it was as a result of those max rated takeoffs.

SARAH FERGUSON: The 500 tonne, six storey high airbus, carrying more than 400 people was almost brought down by a single metal tube. The faulty pipe, was installed on the engine and sent into service, where it cracked under pressure of multiple take offs. The faulty part that did the damage was a little more than five centimetres long, not much bigger than my thumb.

(To Alan Milne) How eager are you to understand how that mis-bored pipe got onto that engine?

ALAN MILNE: Very. I mean you know obviously this is what we think is now the ultimate cause of the failure.

MARTIN DOLAN: We need to understand enough about their quality control systems to understand what led to this occurrence with a particular focus on saying can we be assured that steps have been or will be taken to prevent a recurrence.

SARAH FERGUSON: Four Corners can now reveal that prior to the engine failure in November Rolls Royce had already had problems with oil pipes in exactly the same part of the engine, the bearing support assembly. In 2009 they found an oil vent pipe had cracked on an engine. From then as each engine came in to Rolls Royce for overhaul, they replaced the whole section of the engine containing the suspect pipe. The airlines were told of the changes by November last year. Seventeen Qantas engines had been modified but not the one that exploded in mid air. If it had been, the faulty stub pipe would have been removed.

ALAN MILNE: We expect the manufacturers to be continually modifying and continually improving their designs.

SARAH FERGUSON: The first modification related to their discovery of a crack in a vent pipe, is that right?

ALAN MILNE: Correct.

SARAH FERGUSON: Is that vent pipe and its fracture connected in any way to the fractured stud pipe that caused the engine to explode?

ALAN MILNE: It, look it quite possibly could be, you know, the investigation will look at that of course. But it is in the same area and it did result in a cracked pipe.

SARAH FERGUSON: Part of the ATSB's investigation is now focusing on a possible connection.

MARTIN DOLAN: We are currently still investigating as part of our broader review of what's going on whether there are comparable or like events with Trent 900 series engines but we haven't formed any clear view on that yet.

SARAH FERGUSON: Rolls Royce refused numerous requests to discuss their engines with Four Corners. There are huge interests at stake for the company right now. They are currently competing for the most lucrative engine building contracts in aviation history – to supply engines for the next generation of super passenger carriers, the Boeing Dreamliner.

ALAN MILNE: Can you design manufacturing errors out, you know, no. You can do a lot, but they couldn't have, I don't think they could've planned for this one.

SARAH FERGUSON: You don't hold them responsible?

ALAN MILNE: They still manufactured the engine.

SARAH FERGUSON: So in the end they are responsible?

ALAN MILNE: I think that's being discussed as we speak.

SIMON ROBERTSON, CHAIRMAN, ROLLS ROYCE: We at Rolls Royce have been working closely with Qantas for nearly three decades and have established a strong, close and, I believe, trusted relationship.

SARAH FERGUSON: When Qantas took delivery of the Nancy-Bird Walton two and half years ago, Qantas and Rolls Royce had a lot to celebrate. No one suspected that night that a faulty part had been sealed deep inside one of the engines. With 125 Rolls Royce engines in the Qantas fleet the two companies are bound to each other for the foreseeable future but now Qantas is suing Rolls Royce for $80 million and Qantas's insurers are trying to recover $150 million from Rolls Royce for the damage to the plane.

DAVE EVANS: My son went in for a shoulder operation recently and the doctor said to me, we're going to give him the Rolls Royce treatment and I said, no thanks.

MATT HICKS: I'm not looking for an explanation as to what happened to us. But for the future of this industry you need an openness or people will just get killed. I mean that's as simple as that and if they don't want to do it well you're in the wrong business.

KERRY O'BRIEN: A business where safety is everything.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]