Air New Zealand expects that the issues plaguing the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines that power its fleet of eight Boeing 787-9s will be resolved by around the middle of April.
Chief executive of the Star Alliance carrier Christopher Luxon says that the airline “has made great progress” on replacing intermediate turbine pressure blades in the engines following two incidents in December that caused 787s to return to Auckland.
“We do have a great relationship with Rolls-Royce, we’ve got very high levels of technical capability relative to other airlines and I think we’ve done an absolutely great job of working our way through that, and we’ll be I think in great shape come early/mid-April,” he adds.
A shortage of replacement engines while the Trent 1000s underwent maintenance caused some disruptions to Air NZ’s operations over the peak December period. It was also forced to wet-lease two Airbus A340s from Portuguese ACMI specialist HiFly to make up the capacity shortfall.
Flight Fleets Analyzer shows that three of the 787s are stored at present, likely due to their engines undergoing the required maintenance.
Source: Cirium Dashboard
