Rolls, which has taken a charge of 790 million pounds to tackle the early corroding or cracking of engine blades in the fleet, said the cost of fixing the problem remained in line with earlier estimates.

Rolls-Royce, which makes engines for large civil aircraft and military planes, has been racing to fix the problem which has angered customers such as British Airways and forced the grounding of many planes.

That has complicated the transformation programme led by boss Warren East.

The company said on Thursday that the rest of the business was performing well however, and for the full year it remains confident of meeting its underlying operating profit and free cash flow guidance of 700 million pounds ($913 million), up or down by 100 million pounds.

"Our restructuring programme has continued to make progress as we aim to bring down commercial and administrative costs, improve our engineering efficiency and drive lasting culture change at Rolls-Royce," East said.

(Reporting by Kate Holton, editing by James Davey)