Flights Canceled in South Pacific

The fallout from the volcanic ash cloud spreading over south-east Australia has widened with Qantas, Jetstar and Tiger cancelling all flights in and out of Adelaide. Jetstar has also cancelled all of today's flights in and out of Tasmania and flights to and from New Zealand.

While most of the ash plume is south of the Australian mainland, some is hovering eight to 11 kilometres above Tasmania, Adelaide and New Zealand and is not forecast to move significantly for the next 24 hours.

Virgin Australia CEO Sean Donohue says their decision to continue flying is based on safety assessments and not marketing.

Another Qantas Jet with Engine Trouble

A Qantas Boeing 747 with 431 people on board landed safely in Singapore late Friday after an engine caught fire minutes after it took off from the city-state, the airline and a passenger said.

Just one day earlier a Qantas Airbus A380 superjumbo jet made an emergency landing at the same airport due to an engine blowout.

Qantas said in a statement later that flight QF6 from Singapore to Sydney had an issue with its number 1 engine — one of four engines.

Qantas said the captain of the jumbo jet sought priority clearance to return to Singapore as a precaution. There are 412 passengers, three flight crew and 16 cabin crew.

After the aircraft returned to Singapore, the passengers were taken in a bus to a hotel for an overnight stay. They are expected to leave Saturday.

According to the Qantas website, Flight QF6 is a Boeing 747-400, which is fitted with four Rolls-Royce RB211-524G-T engines. The daily flight operates between Frankfurt and Sydney with a stopover in Singapore.

Qantas Grounds A380s After Engine Incident

Qantas last night grounded its fleet of six A380s after an engine on flight QF32 leaving Singapore was ripped apart by an explosion.

The incident could have implications for the worldwide fleet of super-jumbos.

The airline was last night scrambling to find additional aircraft to carry passengers who were on the stricken super-jumbo and could not say when it would reinstate the A380 jets.

Parts of the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine ripped through the A380's wing, Qantas's first aircraft named after aviator Nancy-Bird Walton, while others fell to the ground over the Indonesian island of Batam. Pieces of debris, the largest a hatch or hold door, fell on 12 locations in the city including the roof of an elementary school, where watching students narrowly escaped injury.

It's the first incident of this type to happen on any A380.

The aircraft was six minutes into the flight to Sydney and at 6000ft on the critical, high-energy climb when the engine came apart.

Three senior captains on the flight found themselves deluged with 54 error messages as the plane's sophisticated computers registered the extent of the damage to the aircraft.

Witnesses on the ground near Batam, on the Indonesian island of the same name, initially thought the aircraft had exploded and said they saw flames and smoke.