Australia's Qantas Airways kept its A380 fleet grounded today after discovering problems on three more of the superjumbo's engines.
A Qantas A380 engine broke apart in flight on Thursday, forcing the world's largest passenger plane to make an emergency landing in Singapore with 459 passengers and crew on board.
Chief Executive Alan Joyce said anomalies were found on three Rolls-Royce engines, which were being removed from the planes after inspections found 'oil where oil shouldn't be on the engines'.
The fleet will stay grounded beyond an initial 48-hour deadline for further checks as a result.
Mr Joyce said he expected the issue to be resolved in 'days not weeks.'
'We're just trying to check what the cause of that would be. These are new engines on new aircraft and they shouldn't have these issues at this stage, so it's given us indication of an area for us to focus into,' Mr Joyce told ABC radio.
Qantas has chartered an aircraft from British Airways and may look to lease other planes to accommodate passengers booked on A380 flights.
A second Qantas flight out of Singapore was forced to make an emergency landing after another problem on Friday, this time with a different Rolls-Royce engine on a Boeing 747-400 jumbo.
Qantas has never had a fatal accident since it started flying jetliners.
Thursday's engine failure was the biggest incident to date for the A380, which went into service in 2007.
Australian air safety investigators said the recovery of a broken engine disk may be crucial in understanding what caused the A380 engine failure.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau issued a statement and photograph of the broken disk and called on residents of Indonesia's Batam Island who may have found the parts of the disk among debris to return it to the police.
'The recovery of that disk could be crucial to a full understanding of the nature of the engine failure, and may have implications for the prevention of future similar occurrences,' said the ATSB.
Meanwhile, Singapore Airlines said it had completed engine inspections on all its Airbus A380 aircraft and did not find any issues of concern.
Singapore Airlines, which was the launch airline for the A380 and operates 11 of the aircraft, initially said it would delay A380 departures, but soon cleared them.
'We have completed the engine inspections on all our A380 aircraft and did not find anything of concern,' SIA spokesman Nicholas Ionides said today.
'The findings of the inspections have been reviewed with Rolls-Royce. Any further checks that may be recommended by the manufacturers will of course be done, and in the meantime we continue with our regular routine checks.'
