Australian airline Qantas (QAN.AX) will resume flying its Airbus 380 fleet from Saturday after engine inspections concluded the airplane was safe to fly, Chief Executive Alan Joyce said on Tuesday.

Qantas grounded its fleet of six Airbus A380s on Nov 4 after one of its Rolls-Royce (RR.L) engines partly disintegrated mid-flight, forcing a plane with 466 people on board to make an emergency landing in Singapore.

Rolls-Royce concluded the incident was caused by an oil fire but said the issue was confined to a specific component and it has since been scrambling to find a fix and replace faulty engines with new turbines.

Joyce last week estimated Rolls-Royce may have to replace as many as 40 engines globally, or about half the engines currently in service on the A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft with an average list price of about US$350 million ($454 million).

The Qantas incident threatened to deal a blow to an already much-delayed A380 programme as Airbus is scheduled to deliver over a dozen Rolls-Royce-powered A380s -- primarily to Singapore Airlines (SIAL.SI), Qantas and Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) by the end of
next year.

However, Airbus can ill afford setbacks in sales for a plane which cost 12 billion euros ($21.1 billion) to develop but has struggled to attract airlines in some key markets including the United States and Japan.