Pratt & Whitney allowed a group of reporters on board the 747SP flying testbed today at Bradley airport near Hartford, Connecticut. Two days ago, the former Korean Air airliner now owned by P&W completed the first flight of the PW1217G, the engine designed to power the Mitsubishi Regional Jet (MRJ). It's another step towards the introduction of a new kind of engine featuring a new kind of propulsion technology -- a 113kg (250lb) gear that decouples the speeds of the fan and low pressure compressor. If Bombardier's schedule holds, a different version of the geared turbofan will fly for the first time aboard the CSeries by the end of this year.
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Pratt & Whitney allowed a group of reporters on board the 747SP flying testbed today at Bradley airport near Hartford, Connecticut. Two days ago, the former Korean Air airliner now owned by P&W completed the first flight of the PW1217G, the engine designed to power the Mitsubishi Regional Jet (MRJ). It's another step towards the introduction of a new kind of engine featuring a new kind of propulsion technology -- a 113kg (250lb) gear that decouples the speeds of the fan and low pressure compressor. If Bombardier's schedule holds, a different version of the geared turbofan will fly for the first time aboard the CSeries by the end of this year.
Pratt & Whitney Media Day is this week, which is a perfect excuse to post this excellent BBC documentary of Rolls-Royce. (Editor: Eh?) Bear with me, please.
We are not suggesting it's appropriate only due to the fact we can find no comparable documentaries on Pratt & Whitney, and not even because we are enthralled by such a revealing look inside the typically buttoned-up on Rolls-Royce (motto: "No comment. Full-stop. Forever.")
It actually is a timely peek inside Rolls-Royce on the eve of a Pratt & Whitney media day, where surely a major theme of press conferences and interviews will be the newly-sealed long-term relationship between these propulsion giants on narrowbody turbofans.
If you recall, last October Pratt & Whitney agreed to buy Rolls-Royce's stake in the International Aero Engines (IAE) consortium, which also includes MTU and Japanese Aero Engines Corp, producing V2500s for Airbus A320s. At the same time, Rolls-Royce formed a new joint venture with Pratt & Whitney to challenge another powerful joint venture -- the General Electric-Safran partnership in CFM International -- for the next-generation single-aisle turbofan market.
Today, perhaps more than ever, the future of Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce are tied closely together.
All that said, this documentary is so good any old excuse would do. Enjoy!
Continue reading Movie Monday: The Beeb's all-access tour inside Rolls-Royce .
A supercomputer called "Sierra" at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that previously cranked numbers to support Big Bang Theory and carbon research will soon helo GE better understand fuel injectors for turbofan engines.
In a new GE Report, the company describes how a computational combustion engineer from GE Global Research and a team of researchers from Arizona State University and Cornell University will in the next few weeks begin running computations with Sierra to devine the details of how fuel flows through an injector. How fuel squirts out of an injector is shown below, courtesy of a GE simulation.
"Fuel injectors sport an intricate design and geometry, work in extreme heat, and must handle punishing pressures," says GE. "They've been notoriously difficult to test and build."
Why use Sierra? GE says high fidelity computer simulations can "significantly reduce the number of trials and can provide insights into why a fuel injector behaves the way it does."
"Understanding how air and fuel burn will help us to ultimately build more powerful engines that consume less fuel and have lower emissions," says GE.
No word on whether the research is directly targetted at GE's GE9X engine work for the Boeing 777X. GE9X, as previously reported by Flightblogger, is said to be a 90,000- to 100,000lb-thrust class engine that will contribute a 10% improvement in fuel burn for the 777-8X/-9X family.
JAL take first (and second) 787 on March 25
Japan Airlines, second customer for the 787, will contractually take delivery of its first 787 on March 25 before a flyaway departure to Tokyo the following day. The final regulatory hurdle before delivery was cleared earlier this week when the Federal Aviation Administration gave final approvals to both the original Block 4 and PIP1 GEnx-1B engines. The two GEnx configurations will be interspersed among the early GE-powered 787 deliveries.
There are strong indications that JAL will not take delivery of not one, but two 787s on Sunday, the program's first dual delivery. Delivery of Airplane 23 (JA822J) is firm at this point, while Airplane 33 (JA825J) may be slated for a late afternoon Monday flyaway as well, say program sources.
I'll be traveling to Seattle late Sunday for the delivery ceremonies and JAL interior unveiling on Monday.
Pratt & Whitney PW1500 certification trials
The PW1524G, Bombardier's CSeries CS100 engine, has begun major FAA certification trials with icing runs at the engine-maker Manitoba, Canada facility. Certification tests official began in mid-January with low pressure turbine stress tests. The engine has undergone more than 1,350h of full testing and nearly 250h under the wing of the company's Boeing 747SP test bed. As of last week, P&W had completed 2000h split between the PW1500G and MRJ's PW1200G engines covering more than 5,000 cycles.
Trent 1000 reliability tops 99.9%
Five months after its introduction with All Nippon Airways, the Trent 1000 engine has topped a dispatch reliability of 99.9%, says Rolls-Royce. The engine-maker notes it is the best introduction of a new RR engine, which has flown more than 4,000h since its late October service entry.
SCOTTSDALE -- A busy first day at ISTAT is currently in the book and we had an opportunity to sit down with Air Lease CEO Steven Udvar-Hazy, who weighed in on a variety of topics. For a year-by-year comparison, make sure to re-read our interview with Udvar-Hazy from ISTAT 2011.
Air Lease Corp chief executive Steven Udvar-Hazy, a vocal advocate for Boeing's now-shelved New Small Airplane concept, says the airframer's strategy to develop the CFM International Leap-1B-powered 737 Max is intended as a bridge to a clean sheet design arriving in the middle of the next decade and "not a long-term solution".
A fierce battle is brewing between GE, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney to supply as many as 3,000 engines to power the re-vamped Embraer E-Jet family.
Steven Udvar-Hazy, Air Lease Corp chief executive describes the three-way contest as "a real dogfight". He anticipates as many as 3,000 engines could be at stake through a sole-source contract to power the Embraer 198, the moniker given to the conceptual aircraft by ALC.
Lufthansa and Air Lease Corp (ALC) are vying for launch customer status on Boeing's proposed stretched 787-10X.
If Boeing moves ahead to "launch the airplane, we could be a definitive launch customer for the -10, in tandem with [ordering] some -9s. So that's in the oven," says Steven Udvar-Hazy, chief executive of ALC.
Photos Credit Boeing & Embraer
The existence of a 2011 request for proposal to GE, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney has now been officially confirmed, as Rolls and P&W have shared preliminary details of its planned 90,000 to 100,000lb thrust class engines to power Boeing's 777X concept.
General Electric, which is the exclusive engine supplier on the 777-300ER, -200LR and freighter, is offering the GE9X for Boeing's conceptual family.
This morning, Rolls detailed its conceptual engine, which it has dubbed the RB3025, exclusively to FlightBlogger and Flightglobal, which it touts will achieve better than 10% improvement in fuel burn against today's GE90-115B engine that powers the 777-300ER, and 15% better than the 777-200ER's Trent 800.
Rated at 99,500lbs with a 337cm (132.5in) fan for the baseline 407-seat 777-9X, giving the RB3025 a bypass ratio of 12:1.
The engine-maker says the current concept provides a low specific thrust and "excellent" propulsive efficiency, along with a 62:1 overall pressure ratio, which, if achieved, would be the highest OPR achieved in a commercial turbofan engine.
The engine builds off of the Trent 1000 and XWB engines, but Nuttall says the RB3025 is derived around its Advanced3 environmentally friendly engine (EFE) technology development programme, which includes a Trent 1000-derived core, lean-burn combustor, composite fan and advanced materials in the high pressure elements of the core.
Additionally, Pratt & Whitney also confirmed it, too, is offering a geared 100,000lb thrust class engine for the 777X in response to Boeing's information request:
Citing an excess of 6,000h and 80,000 cycles on its fan drive gear system (FDGS), P&W says its testing has "validated our analytical prediction that this engine architecture would be suitable to thrusts up to 100,000 pounds."
As the engine-maker "looks ahead to powering future wide-body applications" it plans to "scale the Geared Turbofan architecture to the required thrust levels".
While GE has not confirmed the details of its GE9X offering, the 777's incumbent has begun to begun to firm its own conceptual specifications to power the 777X, say those directly familiar with the engine-maker's planning.
Compared to the 115,000lb-thrust GE90-115B that powers the 777-300ER, the lower thrust 99,500lb and derated-88,000lb GE9X for the 777-9X and -8X, respectively, are enabled by the larger, higher-lift and comparatively lighter composite wing. The eCore-inspired engine would also feature a GEnx-style composite fan casing and third-generation Twin Annular Premixing Swirler (TAPS) Combustor, dubbed TAPS III, say those familiar with the engine maker's planning.The 325cm (128in) diameter GE9X engine is believed to tout an approximately 10:1 bypass ratio, 60:1 overall pressure ratio and 27:1 high pressure compressor ratio, compared to the 42:1 and 23:1 pressure ratios, respectively, on today's GE90-115B.
Boeing says it's far too soon to say if one or more engine choices would be available on the 777X, as it has yet to be officially launched, but it appears that both Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney are readying for a significant battle with GE to power the next-generation 777.
US Federal Aviation Administration certification of the General Electric GEnx-1B-powered 787 is set to slide to early 2012 due to the lack of availability of a production aircraft to satisfy final regulatory requirements, sources confirm.
While Boeing has completed a portion of its extended operations (ETOPS) and functionality and reliability (F&R) testing on a Block 4 GEnx test aircraft ZA005 and ZA006, the FAA mandates a portion of the required 300h F&R campaign to be undertaken on a production aircraft.
Boeing and GE had intended to certify the Block 4 GE-powered 787 variant in the fourth quarter 2011.
Boeing declined to comment on the GEnx 787 certification schedule.
Boeing will employ Airplane 35 a GEnx-powered 787 for Air India as its confirming production article for testing, though the slow process of change incorporation has pushed the aircraft's first flight to the first half of December, sliding the completion of the FAA's Part 25 requirements.
The delay has pushed Air India's first delivery into 2012, after its latest schedule had it being delivered in the fourth quarter of 2011, already delayed from 2009.
The aircraft is expected to transition from the company's Everett, Washington factory to its flight test base at Boeing Field in Seattle later in December, say program sources.
ZA005 remains an active test aircraft, conducting flight tests of the GEnx-1B's first performance improvement package (PIP1), expected to deliver a 1.4% improvement in specific fuel consumption, due to an increase in the number of low pressure turbine (LPT) blades.
The Block 4 GEnx-1B engine configuration received FAA certification in March 2008, and the PIP 1 configuration was certified in August. A second PIP for the GEnx-1B is expected to achieve engine certification next year.
Test aircraft ZA006 is currently having its instrumentation removed in preparation for its coming relocation to Boeing's Global Services & Support facility in San Antonio, Texas for refurbishment.
Boeing has delivered two Rolls-Royce Trent 1000-powered 787s, both to All Nippon Airways and aims to deliver a combined 15 to 20 747-8s and 787 in 2011, two-thirds of which will be 787s.
The slow pace of aircraft change incorporation has continued to put pressure on Boeing's delivery schedule, with its internal planning showing five more deliveries in 2011. However, program sources caution that only one or two 787s for ANA will be ready for delivery before the end of December.
Part Two in a series on the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 turboprop. Read Part One.
BOULDER CITY -- Journalists are advised never to get emotionally entangled in a story, and certainly not physically. Though this assignment found your correspondent unavoidably invested.
I'm about to get thrown out of a perfectly good aircraft with five other people.
"Why gamble with your money when you can gamble with your life???" asks Skydive Las Vegas, with two extra question marks added for emphasis.
Based at Boulder City Airport southeast of The Strip, and just south of Lake Mead, Skydive Las Vegas has been asking that provocative question of its customers since 1993.
When you think of business aviation, red carpets, plush leather cabins and twin turbofans tend to come to mind. Now picture a Pacific Aerospace P-750 XSTOL, a single-engine Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-34A-powered turboprop with bench seating and bare metal floors.
Quantifying the impact of business aviation on the economy is often a difficult and abstract task. Despite being one of the lesser-seen faces of business aviation, the skydiving operations at SLV and its single aircraft and its single engine directly support more than two dozen jobs.
Admittedly, there's not a lot of sex appeal in a half-century old engine design, just a whirring certainty for SLV, which can fly as many four flights an hour; each climbing to 15,000ft, and dropping as many as 16 tandem skydivers at a time.
The aircraft's thick camber wing and its 750hp (560kW) engine, can carry more than 4,000lbs, a payload in excess of the P-750's own empty weight, just 3,100lbs.
Today, I'm strapped to Kelly Corcoran for our tandem jump, along with five of SLV's professional skydivers for some special formation falling.
Our walk to the aircraft is a euphemism uncomfortably referred to at SLV as the 'the green mile walk', a tongue-in-cheek way of disarming, or in some cases arming, a person's concerns about free falling.
After its human payload is headed for Earth, it's a race to the ground. A 3,000fpm descent puts the PT6-powered prop back on the ground before the last jumper's heels hit dirt on the edge of the airport.
The P-750 and its PT6 engine, says SLV owner and manager Brent Buckner, was a natural choice for the job, as the New Zealand-built aircraft is custom designed for skydiving, equipped with a factory-fitted aft door closing mechanism, eliminating the need for an extra crew member to fly along to close the door after jumpers have departed.
"This was the first airplane designed from the ground up for skydiving," says Buckner. "Every other jump airplane that exists today is a modification, it's been modified and changed to accommodate skydiving and the mission.
"This one was designed with skydiving in mind, everything from the performance aspects of it to the internal construction to the specially designed jump door. This is the only aircraft that comes out of the factory skydive ready anywhere in the world."
Separated by nearly 5,900nm, just getting the P-750 from the factory in Hamilton, New Zealand to Boulder City Airport was a saga in itself. The aircraft was fitted with FAA-approved cabin fuel tanks for its island-hopping delivery, raising the gross weight of the aircraft to 10,000lbs, providing a sense of the carrying capacity of aircraft's structure.
The P-750 replaced its PT6-114A-powered Cessna Caravan as its lead aircraft. While the company keeps a 1966 Cessna 182J as a backup, the P-750 is SLV's workhorse, providing around 50% less maintenance and a higher time between overhaul than the Caravan, 3,600h compared to 4,000h.
TOULOUSE -- The familiar Rolls-Royce Trent 900 flying in the number two engine position under the wing of the first A380 has been replaced by Trent XWB as the engine-maker and Airbus are approaching the start of the powerplant's 175h flight test program.
With 1,200h of testing accumulated across eight engines at test facilities in five countries, Chris Cholerton, R-R director of the Trent XWB programme, said specific fuel consumption tests are tracking ahead of expectation for typical early build engines and that it is the company's expectation that the A350's engine will be the "world's most efficient civil turbofan."
The 118in (300cm) fan, designed to produce 84,000lbs of thrust for the A350-900, has been installed on A380 MSN001 with a multi-million dollar bespoke pylon that features on one end an A350 engine interface, and an A380 wing interface on the other.
The heavily instrumented engine has already begun ground runs on the A380, and will relay 1,200 individual parameters, the most for a civil programme by Rolls-Royce, will measure and twice as many as any previous evaluation. The instrumentation alone adds 600kg (1,300lbs) of weight to the test engine.
Once the new majority-composite aircraft is flying, each engine for the A350 flight test program will be less instrumented than the certification engine as the 1,300lbs of instrumentation will be spread across the aircraft's two engines. Both A350 MSN001 and MSN003 will be fully instrumented test aircraft.
On the A380's flight deck, test pilots have a mechanical link installed between the A380's throttle quadrant and the A350's, positioned at the rear of the pedestal. In the cabin of the A380, flight test engineers have live access to all the data streaming off of the engine, as well as access to the Trent's electronic engine control (EEC) software, which will be able to be changed in flight.
While Airbus only says the Trent XWB flying test bed would make its first flight in the "coming weeks", the Rolls-Royce says a minor design change could slide that target further by "a few weeks".
During the engine's required 150h endurance testing, which wrapped up in September, Cholerton said R-R discovered damage on the engine's "rotating air seal that separates the [intermedia pressure] turbine from the back of the [low pressure] turbine"
"That's an issue we can easily resolve," he said, adding an updated design has already been manufactured.
"That's an issue we can easily resolve," he said, adding an updated design has already been manufactured.
If Rolls opts to install the modification before beginning its flight trials the engine will have to be removed from the A380's wing.
"We may elect to change that prior to flight, because we can, it's simple to do," he said. "We can do it here in Toulouse. We can still be flying the flying test bed over a year ahead of first flight. We want to test the final production standard of part, that's a good thing to do for our maturity objectives."
"We may elect to change that prior to flight, because we can, it's simple to do," he said. "We can do it here in Toulouse. We can still be flying the flying test bed over a year ahead of first flight. We want to test the final production standard of part, that's a good thing to do for our maturity objectives."
A well-worn A380 MSN001 rolled out a hangar in Toulouse, France yesterday sporting a newly installed Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engine. The powerplant, rated at 84,000lbs of thrust, will continue to advance Rolls-Royce's certification program for the new engine, which will eventually power the Airbus A350 XWB. The 118in (300cm) diameter fan of the Trent XWB-84 is only slightly larger than that of the three 116in (294cm) Trent 900s that are flying along side the XWB-84.
A shrunken A350-800, whose service entry has slipped to mid-2016, will be powered by a 75,000lb Trent-75, though the type has seen a steady flow of customers away from the variant.
For the A350-1000, a first engine run of its 97,000lb thrust fan is expected in mid-2014, with entry into service to follow three years later. The 2017 availability allows Rolls to incorporate technology from its three-shaft Advance3 engine design into the enhanced Trent XWB, though the improvement in performance on the A350-1000 has also drawn the ire of some customers.
The growing distance between airframe and engine commonality, which has always been a hallmark of Airbus aircraft family design, has frustrated customers like Emirates and Qatar Airways. Airbus says the -1000 will remain about 70% common with the baseline -900.
Enders, by his own acknowledgement, has made a "big jump" in technology with "a lot of unknowns" on the A350, which, at the insistence of customers, was required in 2006 to abandon its original composite wing and A330 metallic fuselage design. Enders' attitude about the -1000 is illustrative of the balancing act the airframer must walk between not increasing the complexity of its own engineering and production operations - thus driving up its cost - while managing the high expectations of its biggest customers.
Though Enders has drawn a line in the sand, telling Flight International the A350-1000 will not be changed to appease individual customers: "For us, that is the solution," he said. "We're not going to redesign it every half-year."
Photos Credit Airbus
A shrunken A350-800, whose service entry has slipped to mid-2016, will be powered by a 75,000lb Trent-75, though the type has seen a steady flow of customers away from the variant.
For the A350-1000, a first engine run of its 97,000lb thrust fan is expected in mid-2014, with entry into service to follow three years later. The 2017 availability allows Rolls to incorporate technology from its three-shaft Advance3 engine design into the enhanced Trent XWB, though the improvement in performance on the A350-1000 has also drawn the ire of some customers.
The growing distance between airframe and engine commonality, which has always been a hallmark of Airbus aircraft family design, has frustrated customers like Emirates and Qatar Airways. Airbus says the -1000 will remain about 70% common with the baseline -900.
Enders, by his own acknowledgement, has made a "big jump" in technology with "a lot of unknowns" on the A350, which, at the insistence of customers, was required in 2006 to abandon its original composite wing and A330 metallic fuselage design. Enders' attitude about the -1000 is illustrative of the balancing act the airframer must walk between not increasing the complexity of its own engineering and production operations - thus driving up its cost - while managing the high expectations of its biggest customers.
Though Enders has drawn a line in the sand, telling Flight International the A350-1000 will not be changed to appease individual customers: "For us, that is the solution," he said. "We're not going to redesign it every half-year."
Photos Credit Airbus
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