The problem is spreading to rival carriers. Virgin Atlantic is putting the final touches this weekend to an announcement on cancellations of its own because of problems with the same Rolls engine, it can be revealed. Among the destinations set to be suspended are the launch of flights to Accra, the capital of Ghana, next summer while the return of flights to Tel Aviv has been delayed until the end of next March.

Sources familiar with the situation point out that it is a row that has been bubbling away beneath the surface for more than a year, costing both airlines tens of millions of pounds.

So what has gone wrong? And perhaps more importantly, can the problems be fixed? To understand this we have to go back to the launch of Rolls’s Trent 1000 engine for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner aircraft more than a decade ago.

● BA and Virgin cancel hundreds of flights as engines await maintenance

For the uninitiated, aircraft makers often offer a choice of engines manufactured by different companies to airline customers. On the Dreamliner, airlines were offered the option of a Rolls engine or one built by General Electric.

It wasn’t long after the Dreamliner took to the skies for its first commercial flight in 2011 that questions started to be asked about the durability of the Trent 1000 engine. Like most issues with complex engineering, the problems were multifaceted, but centred on the fan blades inside the engine.

Boeing had decreed that it wanted two engines on the Dreamliner rather than the four on the 747 jumbo jet that the aircraft replaced. And so Rolls had used every bit of their engineering wizardry to make the blades strong enough to cope with the thrust needed to propel a plane carrying 330 passengers up the runway.

The force exerted on the blades during takeoff is the equivalent of nine London buses being hung on them. So Rolls went so far as to rearrange metal alloys at an atomic level to ensure their robustness.

The problem was that the Trent 1000’s blades began degrading more quickly than anticipated when environmental contaminants such as pollution or sand came into contact with high temperature air. Coupled with this, it emerged that the integrity of the blades was further weakened by poorly designed cooling holes.

Another problem was that because the engine had fewer blades than previous models, they were found to create “resonant frequency” — the phenomenon by which an opera singer can break a glass with the vibrations in her voice — with other parts of the engine, weakening them.

Upgrades and fixes were rolled out subsequently, costing Rolls billions of pounds and sending its shares to near ten-year lows by the end of 2019. Given the historical weaknesses, more regular maintenance of the Trent 1000 continues to be required to this day.

The current problem is that Rolls is struggling to access spare parts to perform such maintenance. This has created a backlog of aircraft stuck in hangars. Airline sources suggest that Rolls’s lack of maintenance capacity is also to blame, claims that are denied by Rolls.

A BA source said: “We’re one of the biggest operators of the Trent 1000 engine in the world and we’re yet to see anything from them that gives us any confidence that they understand just how damaging this issue is for us. We urgently need to see Rolls-Royce take ownership of this crisis and deliver an acceptable plan that includes mitigation, actions and a credible timeline that will allow us to map out our future flying schedule with confidence.”

A Rolls-Royce spokesman hit back: “As an organisation, we’re taking decisive action and moving quickly to prioritise the resources needed to reduce the impact. Given the impact created by the current supply-chain constraints, it’s one of our top priorities.”

The crisis has left six of BA’s fleet of 41 Dreamliners grounded. The airline has been able to navigate around the groundings in recent months by using standby aircraft from its fleet of Boeing 777 jets.

But not any more. The 777s are much older aircraft, averaging about 20 years old compared with seven for the Dreamliner, according to the website Planespotters. The increased usage of these aircraft means they also needed to be grounded to recover and receive routine maintenance.

BA said that it chose to preemptively cancel flights “because we do not believe the issue will be solved quickly”. Virgin is expected to double the number of its grounded Dreamliners next year because of similar issues, sources said.

Rolls is certainly not sitting on its hands. The company has embedded 50 staff with suppliers to address shortages and is even offering stocks of its own raw materials to them to speed up production.

“These changes are already having a positive impact. So far this year, we’ve increased Trent 1000 supply-chain output by a third, making more components available and minimising the time engines spend in our maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) centres,” a spokesman for the engine maker said.

“We know that demand will increase in the future. So we have allocated additional investment this year to ensure we can meet that demand, creating some short-term surge capacity and allowing us to approximately double our MRO capacity by 2030. This will ensure scheduled maintenance, such as that of the British Airways Trent 1000 fleet, can be conducted as efficiently as possible.”

The long-term aim, however, is to reduce the amount of maintenance the Trent 1000 requires, increasing what is known in the industry as the engines’ “time-on-wing”. Naturally, this is important for airlines because they only make money when planes are in the air, but it is equally as important to Rolls, whose revenues are linked to the operational performance of its engines.

To address this, Rolls is spending £1 billion on a “durability enhancement package” for the Trent 1000. This is in the final stages of certification by the Federal Aviation Administration, the US aviation regulator, and is expected to more than double the engine time on-wing. Other enhancements will deliver a further improvement of up to 30 per cent, Rolls said.

BA sources are sceptical that they will see any improvements in service soon. “Rolls-Royce needs to stop making excuses, blaming supply-chain issues and passing the impact onto airlines and instead focus on giving us a credible and speedy solution to a problem of its own making,” one said.

From next summer, BA will not fly to Bahrain for the first time in more than 90 years. It has also cancelled direct services to Kuwait for the first time in more than 60 years. Bosses at the airline will be hoping that they will be returning soon. Otherwise, more airlines around the world could soon be “disregarding” Rolls.