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on the ground and was asked to turn off the number one engine. Confusion. On the flight deck they thought they had turned off the number one engine. The crew attempted to shut off the engine using the master switch, then by using the emergency shut-off and fire-extinguisher bottles. The fire crew outside told them it was still running. In the meantime, the fire chief was warned about the burning hot brakes and sprayed fire retardant foam onto the leaking fuel to prevent an explosion. Adrian Mouritz, head of aerospace and aviation engineering at RMIT University, later told the Sydney Morning Herald that the airline was ‘very, very lucky’ that leaking, highly flammable aviation fuel was not ignited by a spark from the severed wiring in the wing. ‘If that fuel ignited, that aircraft would have exploded,’ he said.8 Prompt action on the ground also prevented a catastrophic explosion.

Meanwhile, all controls to engine number one were severed and it continued to run. It was 55 minutes before the relieved passengers began to exit from a single door on the right of the plane. It took an hour to get them all off. Captain de Crespigny addressed the passengers in the terminal building, spent 20 minutes answering questions and even handed out his mobile phone number. His wife, Coral, had been called by Qantas at their home in Northbridge on Sydney’s North Shore and told what had happened. ‘He’s such a smart guy. If I was in a dire situation on a plane I would want to know Rich was up front,’ she said.9 She texted him: ‘Wow that was lucky.’ He texted back, ‘Yes,’ and that he ‘was very busy’.10

So were the ground engineers and Qantas maintenance staff outside, who were still battling to switch off the number one engine. When all else failed, they finally opted to drown it with fire-fighting foam – only then closing it down, two hours and seven minutes after the aircraft landed. Captain de Crespigny later described the A380 as indestructible and has started to write a book about the aircraft.

The passengers on QF32 were not the only ones who had been on a rollercoaster ride. Qantas shares plummeted five per cent from $2.96 to a low of $2.82 within four minutes of the first sketchy report of the incident reaching the stock exchange. The plane was still in the air as hedge fund managers sold down Qantas stock to make a fast fortune. Half an hour later, news came through that the plane had landed and the share price surged back up to $2.93, before closing for the day at $2.89. Proof, if any were needed, that Qantas’s value is very much linked to its performance and safety record.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce responded to the incident immediately, grounding all six of the airline’s A380s while investigations into what went wrong were carried out. ‘These are new engines, they’re a new design from Rolls-Royce, they’re engines that are particular for the A380 and they’ve been operating on all the A380 fleet,’ he said.11 It was the opening salvo in what would become a bitter and damaging public row between the airline and the British engine manufacturer. Rolls-Royce quickly took responsibility for the engine failure as safety agencies around the world began inquiries. Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa, which also powered their A380s with Rolls-Royce engines, were forced to carry out safety checks too. With the planes on the ground, Qantas was losing money on its key routes to Europe and America. It sought legal redress and gained permission to sue Rolls-Royce for $100 million of damages under the Trade Practices Act if the two could not reach a commercial settlement.

The initial response from Rolls-Royce to the QF32 incident was to instruct airlines to operate the Trent 900 engines at a reduced rate of thrust while the British engineers sorted out the problem. But Qantas argued that Rolls-Royce had said in 2000 and 2001 that the engines could take off using 76,000 pounds of thrust and that they had the built-in flexibility to power what are, at 72 metres long and with a take-off weight of 560 tonnes, the biggest commercial passenger planes in