Air safety bodies in Britain and the US each issued reports yesterday on the same incidents, but used starkly different language in their conclusions.

The American accident investigators emphasised the continuing dangers on Boeing 777s with Rolls-Royce engines and specifically stated that, with two failures in less than a year, another incident was a “high probability”.

Their British counterparts reached the same conclusions about the cause of the incidents and made the same recommendations, but their report was devoid of any sense of urgency.

Indeed, anyone reading it in isolation would think that the problem had largely been resolved and that passengers had no cause for concern. The very different approaches of the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) are encapsulated in their approach to identifying the aircraft involved in the incidents.

The AAIB refuses to name any airline and simply refers to aircraft by their call signs (G-YMMM in the case of the BA 777 that crashed at Heathrow last year).

This used to be quite effective in helping airlines to avoid embarrassment. But all it now takes to identify the airline behind each call sign is a quick search on the internet.

By contrast, the NTSB makes no attempt to spare the blushes of the airlines. It not only names them throughout its report, but uses emotive language to draw attention to its concerns about the continuing risk.

The NTSB press release accompanying the report is headlined “urgent safety recommendations” and refers to continuing “hazards” and “safety vulnerability”.

It includes a colourful quotation from the NTSB’s acting chairman, Mark Rosenker: “With two of these rollback [engine power loss] events occurring within a year, we believe that there is a high probability of something similar happening again.”

The AAIB report makes no mention of a possible recurrence, but makes the same main recommendation: that Rolls-Royce should “develop changes which prevent ice from causing restriction to the fuel flow”.

The AAIB does not suggest any deadline for making the changes but simply advises that they should be “introduced in a timely manner”, leaving it up to airlines to decide when.

It admits that more research is needed into the problem of ice in fuel systems, but removes urgency by anticipating that this will take “several years to complete”.

The NTSB states that the new component should be ready within a year and that airlines should install it “at the next maintenance check or within six months, whichever comes first”.

The AAIB has a tradition of securing the cooperation of manufacturers, airlines and pilots by being discreet in how it apportions blame.

Rolls-Royce is now redoubling its efforts to get the new components ready. It is close to admitting that it would be unacceptable for 220 aircraft to fly another winter with components vulnerable to ice blockages – yet it has taken an American intervention to make it accept the urgency of the situation.

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