'Incredibly unusual': Fuel leak forces Chicago-bound Air NZ flight to land with one engine

An Air New Zealand flight to Chicago was forced to shut down an engine this week after developing a fuel leak in what has been described as an “incredibly unusual event”. Flight NZ26 was about an hour out of Auckland last Saturday when a warning system in the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner alerted pilots to a fuel discrepancy, Air New Zealand head of flight operations Hugh Pearce said. The system then guided the pilots through a checklist to determine the cause of the discrepancy, which turned out to be a fuel leak in the left engine – one of two Rolls-Royce engines on the Dreamliner. The fuel discrepancy was reported on Saturday, but the fuel leak and single-engine landing have just come to light. “The checklist then guides you to shut the engine down to secure the problem and ensure there’s no further discrepancy generated, and that’s precisely what the pilots did,” Pearce said. “So they went through this problem-solving while they were turning around and coming back to Auckland. They descended, they dumped some fuel so they would be lighter for landing, and then they continued through for a single-engine landing.” Pearce said it is “incredibly unusual” to shut down an engine for any reason, describing a fuel leak as a “very unusual event”. “To give you an idea, the worldwide statistics are 0.0057 per thousand engine hours”. Air New Zealand pilots train for single-engine landings on routine simulator sessions, which take place over two days every six months. After landing safely in Auckland, the aircraft was inspected by engineers, who confirmed the fuel leak in the engine.<br/>