Qantas A380 landing: Airlines were warned in August over engine safety

• Two airlines ground fleets after emergency Qantas landing
• Europe's air safety watchdog issued safety alert in summer

Firefighters spray the Qantas A380 Airbus which suffered massive engine failure early yesterday with 459 people on board. Photograph: Vivek Prakash/Reuters

Two airlines grounded their fleets of Airbus A380 superjumbos today following an emergency landing by a Qantas plane after one of its engines blew apart in mid-air, damaging a wing and showering debris on the ground below.

It emerged tonight that in August Europe's air safety watchdog issued an alert about abnormal wear inside the British-made Rolls Royce engines used on the huge, double-decker planes, though experts said it was too early to tell if the two were connected.

Flight QF32 from London to Sydney had just taken off from a stopover in Singapore when the plane suffered what the Qantas chief executive, Alan Joyce, described as a "significant engine failure".

Passengers described a loud bang and a flash of flame. They then saw part of the casing of engine apparently stripped away, and a small hole in the wing. Dozens of pieces of debris, believed to be from the engine, were found on the Indonesian island of Batam. "There were flames, yellow flames came out, and debris came off. You could see black things shooting through the smoke, like bits of debris," said passenger Rosemary Hegardy.

While the plane, carrying 433 passengers and 26 crew, was able to circle to dump fuel before landing safely at Singapore's Changi airport shortly before midday local time, Qantas – famous, thanks to the film Rain Man, for its enviable safety record – announced it was grounding its A380s. Experts from the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch flew to Singapore yesterday to help the inquiry.

"We do take our safety reputation unbelievably seriously and we're not going to take risks with passenger safety," Joyce said. "As a precaution, we're suspending flights of the A380." Early this morning Singapore Airlines said its A380 services would continue as technical checks had been completed. Lufthansa was conducting checks without interrupting flights. Two other airlines that fly the A380 use other engines.

The incident – the most serious safety scare involving the world's biggest airliner in its three years of service – is a particular worry for Rolls Royce, which makes the Trent 900 engines fitted to most A380s at its Derby factory. The company, which lost more than 5% of its share price today, said it was working with airlines to see what went wrong. It refused to discuss the directive issued by the European Aviation Safety Agency in August which warned that scrutiny of stripped Trent 900s had found that unusual wear on splines used to secure the turbines could lead to engine failure coupled with "oil migration and oil fire".