FlightBlogger Archive 2007-2012

Category: FlightBlogger

Airbus looks to Sharklet structure to lay A320neo groundwork

Following last week’s roll-out of the first Airbus A320 fitted with Sharklets – and the new addition of its shark teeth – there were a lot of questions about what modifications were required to actually fit the new winglets to the narrowbody.

The extent of the modifications made to A320 MSN001 should provide an indication of why a retrofit program may prove to be extremely costly for in-service pre-2012 A320s.

The flight testing had initially been slated to begin in October, though the installation of the required structure for the Sharklets proved “tedious”, with additional work needed in the original 1987-model narrowbody, which has been changed multiple times during its life as a flight test aircraft.

To equip an already-built A320 for flight test, Airbus had to remove the wing’s flaps and slats to then remove the wing skin for internal reinforcement and installation of flight test instrumentation. While there are no changes to the wing’s spar configuration, the outer spar and most ribs are strengthened with added material.

Of the ribs in the wing of an A320, Rib 27, the outer-most, has been fully redesigned to offer compatibility with the current wing fences and the option to fit the Sharklet at a later date. All of the ribs outboard of Rib 8 have been strengthened after Airbus re-studied the higher bending yaw and torque loads that would come from the installation of the new wingtip treatment.

Further, Airbus is also strengthening the aircraft’s center wing box in some local areas, though rather than make second modification for the updates to the structure for the A320neo starting in 2015, the airframer will add “all the modifications in pretty much one pass” on the first Sharklet-equipped A320, says Tom Williams, Airbus executive vice president programmes.

“So we think we’ll have it done in a way that will take care of both Sharklet and Neo without having to have two iterations of it,” he adds of the incremental approach to the new variant’s development.

Additional inboard rib and spar reinforcement for the added maximum takeoff weight and new CFM Leap-1A and Pratt & Whitney PW1100G engines will be incorporated when the A320neo goes into production well ahead of the October 2015 service entry with Qatar Airways.

The strengthened Sharklet center wing box will mean higher structural weight in those areas, though Williams says an airframe-wide weight-reduction plan of around 440lbs (200kgs) will make the reinforcement weight neutral.

“If you take a delivery of an aircraft last year (2010) and an aircraft next year (2012),” Williams said in April, “You’ll not be able to tell the difference between fuel burn and performance of those aircraft; whether they’re Sharklet-ready aircraft or not. So, I think it’s a pretty good incorporation of some very sound engineering work.”

The new Sharklet-ready wings are expected to enter the production system in early 2012 and will be delivered to customers with wingtip fences before being modified with the new winglets following their EASA certification late next year.

Photo Credit Airbus

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 27, 2011
Video Blog: The lesser-seen face of business aviation (jumping from a perfectly good airplane)

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.

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 23, 2011
Photo of Note: First Premium Aerotec A350 section heads for St. Nazaire (Update1)

Spotters in Hamburg captured A350 forward fuselage Section 13/14 being loaded into the Beluga SuperTransporter on Monday. The four-panel Section 13/14 is fabricated and assembled by Premium Aerotec in Nordenham, Germany, another wholly-owned EADS subsidiary and sent by boat to Hamburg for equipping.

UPDATE: Pictured in the photo is MSN1.

Judging by the photograph, the section was being shipped from Hamburg Airport to St. Nazaire where it will be joined with Aerolia’s Section 11/12, the A350’s nose and flight deck. The fully joined forward fuselage will be reloaded onto the Beluga for shipment to final assembly in Toulouse.

Airbus will first activate its final assembly line with the A350 static airframe, dubbed ‘ES’ by the airframer, followed by the first test aircraft MSN1. After being assembled, ES will be tested in the L34 facility in Toulouse.

Airbus said MSN001’s Section 13/14 had been handed over to the Hamburg facility on October 20, while Premium Aerotec said its “first A350 XWB fuselage section” made the 12hr boat journey to Hamburg on November 10 – not saying explicitly if that was ES or MSN001. The announcement came the same day the airframer delayed the new majority-composite jet’s entry into service to the first half of 2014. ~~It not clear from the photo if this particular Section 13/14 is ES or MSN001.~~

Photo Credit Helmut

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 23, 2011
A320’s sharkets latest in Airbus quest for narrowbody winglets

The original A320 prototype rolled out of a hangar in Toulouse this morning, sporting Airbus-designed winglets or “sharkets”, which will enter service with Air New Zealand starting next year. The coming flight test evaluations represent a near-final configuration in a long series of evaluations undertaken by Airbus to take its original wing fence design and replace it with a full-fledged winglet. The wing fence design was first introduced with the A320-200 model in November 1988.

Airbus returned to evaluations of wingtip treatments for the A320 family in early 2006, announcing it would flight test two designs. The first, a standard angled winglet and the second and a parabolic blended winglet design from Winglet Technologies. The angled winglet was flight tested in April 2006 and the parabolic design followed on MSN001 in July of that same year.

Airbus turned to Aviation Partners for a better winglet design after the 2006 angled and parabolic trials failed to achieve the desired improvement in performance. The Seattle-based Aviation Partners is better known for the its joint venture with Boeing, providing winglets for the 737, 757 and 767 family aircraft. The company offered a scimitar blended winglet to Airbus for the A320 family, flight testing the design in December 2008.

JetBlue, eager to get its hands on the fuel saving winglets for its flee, lent an aircraft to Airbus for flight testing of both the angled and parabolic winglets designs during the initial trials on MSN2755 in June and September 2006, as well as the Aviation Partners scimitar design aboard MSN1904 in January 2010.

Airbus made its winglet plan official with its selection of its own design at the 2009 Dubai Air Show, branding its own configuration as “sharklets”. At June’s Paris Air Show, Airbus also agreed to evaluate a retrofit winglet program for existing A320 family aircraft, though few details of the program have been firmed up.

Photos Credit Airbus (1, 2, 5), Christophe Ramos (3) & Yannick Delmarre (4)

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 21, 2011
Rolls-Royce advances toward Trent XWB flight test aboard A380

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.

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.”

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 18, 2011
Lion Air becomes second disclosed 737 MAX customer, buys 201

AFP is reporting out of Jakarta, Indonesia this morning that low-cost carrier Lion Air, who served as launch customer for the Boeing 737-900ER, has placed a record $21.7 billion order for 230 737s, including 201 737 Max aircraft.

The order is said to include options for 150 additional aircraft.

According to the reports, the announcement was paired with President Barack Obama’s arrival in Indonesia and comes just days after Boeing broke its own order record with Emirates’ $18 billion purchase of 50 777-300ER.

Boeing has not yet confirmed the report, nor has it disclosed the list price of any of its 737 MAX models.

Lion AIr joins American Airlines as the second disclosed customer to commit to the 737 MAX, whose commitments stand at 700 from nine customers. Boeing has not yet to firmed any orders for its recently launched CFM International Leap-1B powered 737.

UPDATE 9:35 AM: Boeing confirms the order, which currently stands as a commitment for 230 737 family aircraft, with options for 150 more.

UPDATE 10:34 AM: My first pass at the story: Lion Air commits to up to 380 Boeing 737s

Photo Credit Boeing

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 17, 2011
JAL 787 completes eight months of change incorporation in Texas (Update1)

Boeing’s Airplane 23, ZA177 for Japan Airlines, ferried to Everett on November 13 with little fanfare.

Yet this particular 787 returned quite different from when it left the Pacific Northwest in March. The aircraft completed eight months of change incorporation at Boeing’s Global Support & Services facility in San Antonio, Texas.

The site, which sits adjacent to Lackland Air Force Base, is being used to modify six 787; refurbishing the three commercially viable test aircraft, three production aircraft, as well as the 747-8F test fleet.

Boeing has not yet decided if it will expand San Antonio’s scope beyond these first six 787s.

The duration of ZA117’s stay in San Antonio provides an indication of both the scope and pacing of the 787 change incorporation operation that is taking place in Texas and Washington State.

Further, it also provides a broad measurement of the top of Boeing’s learning curve for modifying 787s, as aircraft assembled after Airplane 23 will require less re-work.

When the facility was first inaugurated in early-March, Boeing was bullish on how long it would take for a 787 to be modified and brought into full post-certification compliance before being outfitted with a revenue interior:

“We’re not far away,” says David Pickering, director of field operations at the Everett site. “This signifies a point in the program where this airplane is getting darn close. A few months worth of work down here and managing the end of flight test, and then we’re looking at interiors.”

Pickering adds Boeing will know if additional aircraft will be coming to San Antonio at the conclusion of flight test around “early summer” in June or July.

Airplane 23, also known as ZA177, is expected to remain in San Antonio for change incorporation until mid-summer, before returning to Everett for final installation of the aircraft’s interior and repainting with JAL’s new colors.

With Z24 to be released later this month, Boeing’s latest delivery and production schedule, there are strong suggestions the pace of change incorporation in Everett and San Antonio has slowed 2011 deliveries further, pushing early aircraft into 2012.

While in Texas, Airplane 23 underwent extensive changes including wholesale replacement of its environmental control system air-conditioning packs and modification of ducting and baffling in the aircraft’s cabin, as well as motor and fan changes and related software.

Further, modifications were made to the aircraft’s flight control system hardware and software, changing out the outboard ailerons, outboard and inboard flaps and flaperons, as well as making changes to the elevator and rudder systems.

The aircraft now features a new wiring configuration, along with the fully certified version of the updated electrical power distribution system that was changed after the November 2010 fire aboard test aircraft ZA002.

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 16, 2011
Three to five Embraer E-Jet EV family sets up engine battle (Update1)

With its E-Jet sales surging and regional competitor Bombardier focused on the clean-sheet 125 to 149-seat CS100 and CS300, Embraer is turning its focus to the evolution of its existing commercial aircraft with a new engine ready by 2018, currently dubbed the EV.

Flightglobal reports out of the Dubai Air Show (PDF Daily) elaborate on the Brazilian airframer is plans to focus on a re-engined version of the E-175, E-190 and E-195, with a potential fourth member of the EV family with a further stretch of the E-195 to 130 seats. The fifth, a re-engined E-170, the smallest member of the E-Jet family, is less likely, says Cesar de Souza e Silva, president of Embraer Commercial Aviation, unless scope clauses in the US are relaxed.

“If that does not happen, then we may not go ahead with the 170,” he says.

The move toward a re-engined E-Jet sets up a major engine competition between General Electric and its CF34-10E replacement engine, Passport, and Pratt & Whitney’s PW1000G. Only those two engines were mentioned by Embraer, while the 16,000-25,000lb Rolls-Royce Advance2 (PDF) and its 2016 and 2017 service readiness was not included.

The aiframer is currently studying a new wing for the family, as well as an updated flight deck, full fly-by-wire and implementation of composite materials.

Low Cost and Regional Aviation News reports Cesar says the EV “could be similar to when Boeing produced the 737NG with almost an all-new aircraft inside the same skin.”

Rendering Credit Embraer

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 15, 2011
Boeing’s new jets illustrate different paths with largest customers Emirates and Southwest (Update1)

Many say that Emirates is to the 777 as Southwest is to the 737 and Sunday’s order for 50 more 777-300ER aircraft cemented that status further. The order, the largest in Boeing’s history, is worth up to $26 billion when factoring in the 20 additional options, though the company’s largest customers receive heavy discounts for their purchases.

Emirates is known for using the Dubai Air Show for its splash orders, spending an estimated $34.2 billion (at list prices) for 70 Airbus A350s, 11 A380s and 12 777-300ERs in 2007.

With 95 777s in operation today and another 41 777-300ERs on order, Emirates has accounted for 9.7% of the program’s total deliveries since 1995. That share will grow to 10.2% in March 2012 when the airline takes delivery of the 1,000th 777, the airline’s 102nd of the type. When factoring in the 50 new orders, Emirates is responsible for 24% of the 777’s backlog, which stands today at 375.

Emirates also holds the largest share of the A380 backlog at 41%, 73 on order, and the second largest for the A350 at 12.3% with 70 on the books.

To look at the historical ordering patterns of Boeing’s largest narrowbody customer, Southwest behaves similarly to the aircraft-maker’s largest widebody customer. On an backlog-to-backlog comparison, the 92 outstanding orders held by Southwest represents 4.2% of Boeing’s future 737 deliveries.

According to its orders and delivery website, Southwest has placed direct orders with Boeing for 676 737s (of all generations). Though the most frequently occurring order quantity may surprise: Three. Yes, in that total there are huge blocks of orders for 63, 59 and 94 aircraft, but Southwest’s Red DNA – its steady methodical growth – has defined its time as a Boeing customer.

Similarly, even with Sunday’s mega-order for 50 777s, Emirates’ direct buying behavior matches Southwest’s, with a median order total of just 11 777 aircraft at a time since 1992.

With their massive stakes in the future of the Boeing backlog, both customers have already laid out their respective capacity bridges to the company’s future products. The launched and yet-to-be-defined 737 Max and yet-to-be-launched but more defined 777-9X have met different reactions by the airframer’s biggest customers.

The two airlines diverge when it comes to providing public input for Boeing’s new development programs. Former Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher’s comments to Aviation Week on the eve of the surprise American Airlines 737 re-engining decision was largely seen as the subtle cue for the future of the narrowbody which has forever been the centerpiece of the low-cost carrier’s fleet.

Emirates’ propensity for public commentary with its aircraft suppliers’ product strategies are well documented. President Tim Clark’s displeasure with the latest iteration of the A350-1000 and its advice to Boeing about the future of the 777-9X, the composite winged 777-300ER successor, are hallmarks of its methods of persuasion.

The Dubai-based carrier’s own relationship with Boeing remains fundamentally different from Southwest’s. Despite the mega order and the deep involvement in the -9X’s development,

Applying a Red or Blue label to Emirates isn’t as straightforward as it seems. While Emirates could be called Red, with its tightly integrated growth strategy with the Emirate of Dubai, it exists in a developing (immature) market, where innovating its products rather than processes yields a high return. For its relationship with Boeing and Airbus, the relationship is zero-sum: “All I have to do is pick up the phone and order more Boeing 777s,” Clark warned Airbus in 2010 regarding delays to the A350.

Though Emirates eagerness to serve as launch customer for the -9X stands in contrast to Southwest’s reservation of judgement over the 737 Max: “We are just now being briefed on what it does, what it doesn’t do, and it’s just too early to give you an answer on either our evaluation of that or what we might do,” said Southwest CEO Gary Kelly on the airline’s third quarter 2011 earnings call.

For Boeing, there remains a marked difference between the inception of the 737 Max and the 777-9X and how the company has developed each product. Both are intended to be incremental evolutions of today’s products, with an estimated three years between them, but how each have come about with the input of the airframer’s largest customers could not be more different.

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 14, 2011
Travel Day: CDG-IAD

Travel Day: CDG-IAD, originally uploaded by flightblogger.

PARIS — It was a sprint from one flight to another at De Gaulle after a spontaneous strike by the Air France gate agents in Toulouse delayed my flight north by two hours. The run between terminals ended shortly before this photo was taken and with minutes to spare and more than 100 passengers still left to board ten minutes before our departure time. You may recognize the aircraft in the photo, it’s F-HPJA, MSN033, the first Airbus A380 delivered to Air France. The seven-plus hour flight to Dulles will be my first extended opportunity to churn through all of yesterday’s A350 briefings, which were rife with the lessons gleaned from the A380 program. Much more still to come. See you on the other side of the pond.

This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.

This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.

November 11, 2011