BA Further Rejigs Schedule Over Rolls-Royce Delays

DALLAS — British Airways (BA) announced today that it had made further schedule modifications due to delays in the delivery of engines and spares from Rolls-Royce, specifically the Trent 1000 engines fitted to its 787 aircraft.

Rolls-Royce has been working on various performance enhancement packages and redesigns to address engine durability concerns. However, supply chain restrictions and the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated the resolution of these issues.

The engine in question, the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000, has had several troubles and delays. Here's a timeline of the events surrounding the engine parts delay:

Early Issues

2011: The Trent 1000 engine begins commercial service with All Nippon Airways (ANA). Five years later, corrosion-related fatigue cracking of intermediate pressure (IP) turbine blades was discovered. Problems escalated.

In 2017, Rolls-Royce confirmed that durability issues had affected up to 500 engines in its global fleet. In April 2018, the FAA issued an airworthiness directive banning extended operations for Boeing 787s equipped with Trent 1000 Package C engines.

In June of the same year, the engine maker identified similar IP Compressor durability issues on several Package B engines. In February 2019, Rolls-Royce reported 35 Boeing 787s grounded due to engine difficulties.

The last August before the pandemic, Rolls-Royce announced a delay in reducing the number of grounded aircraft. A month later, the firm pushed back the schedule for fixing the Trent 1000 issue to return to single-digit aircraft on ground (AOG) by Q2 2020. 

Recent Developments

2021: Rolls-Royce continues to work on repairs during the pandemic outage. In 2022, the business expects to implement the remaining two durability improvements:

• Newly designed intermediate-pressure compressor blades for Package B engines.
• New design of high-pressure turbine blade for Trent 1000 TEN engines.

In February 2024, Rolls-Royce announced that supply chain difficulties would continue to impact operations until 2026. 3. Last month, BA reported continuous delays in receiving engines and parts from Rolls-Royce, resulting in flight cancellations.