Australian crash investigators hunt crucial superjumbo part.

Sydney - Australian crash investigators Sunday pleaded with residents of Indonesia's Batam Island to help them recover a 'crucial' part from the Qantas Airways A380 that last week made an emergency landing in Singapore after one of its four engines failed.

The engine blow-out aboard Flight QF32 four minutes after takeoff Thursday sent broken parts and shards of engine cowling raining down on Batam.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) urged residents to hand in to police any fragments, in particular a metal disk with a worn flange that could be the key to explaining the failure of the Rolls-Royce engine.

'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,' the bureau said in a statement on its website.

Qantas grounded its flagship fleet of A380s, a jet that began commercial flights in 2007 and which is the world's largest passenger aircraft.

Qantas chief Alan Joyce ascribed the A380 engine blowout to a material failure or design fault rather than a maintenance lapse. The 2-year-old superjumbo operating QF32 had recently been serviced by Lufthansa in Frankfurt, Germany.

Joyce acknowledged the airline had received directives from the European Aviation Safety Agency concerning the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines fitted to the six A380s flown by Qantas. It had acted on the alerts, he said.

The alerts, in January and August, concerned abnormal wear inside the engines.
Sydney-bound Flight QF32 landed safely in Singapore nearly two hours after taking off.
Asked by German Press Agency dpa whether the fragment was the key to the engine failure, Bob Kells, the bureau's duty officer in Canberra, said: 'We don't know. It's called a resultant part. We

want to know if this was the part that initiated the problem.'

Kells said the flanged disk fragment, which looks like part of the gearbox of a car, would not be aluminium but 'some exotic material.'

The A380 emergency landing was followed 24 hours later by a Sydney-bound Qantas Boeing 747-

400 also experiencing an engine failure and returning to Singapore for an emergency landing.
To cap the 90-year-old carrier's string of mechanical problems, a 747-400 was forced to make an emergency landing at London's Heathrow Airport on Friday.

The jumbo was met on the tarmac by fire crews after the pilot reported a hydraulic fuel fault. A Qantas spokeswoman told Sydney's Sun-Herald newspaper that an examination showed it was a false alarm and the hydraulics were operating normally.

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