Leeham News and Analysis
There's more to real news than a news release.
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 23.
By Bjorn Fehrm
May 23, 2025, ©. Leeham News: We do a Corner series about the state of developments to improve the emission situation for Air Transport. We try to understand why development has been slow.
We have since we started in October last year looked at:
- Alternative, lower emission, propulsion technologies, ranging from electric aircraft with batteries as energy source, different propulsion hybrids, and new concepts for Jet-Fuel and Hydrogen gas turbine engines.
- We have also looked at recent research into the role of CO2, NOx emissions and Contrails generated by airliners.
- Three weeks ago, we summarized the present situation around SAF, Sustainable Aviation Fuel.
We examined Alternative 1’s emissions improvement two weeks ago and compared it to the normal improvement in new airliners’ fuel consumption last week. Now, we examine the improvement that SAF can offer compared to the other two.
Boeing publicizes fourth Chief Aerospace Safety Officer Report
By Bjorn Fehrm
May 21, 2025, © Leeham News: Boeing Chief Aerospace Safety Officer Don Ruhmann publishes his 2025 Safety Report today. Leeham was present in briefings both on the report content (this article) and how the safety work is progressing in view of recent problem areas (a Monday article).
The report describes the work of the dedicated Chief Aerospace Safety Office, established in 2021. The office is focused on preventing accidents by fostering an active safety culture. The 2025 report describes areas where Boeing’s Safety work has been improved and expanded.
This is the fourth report published since Boeing started to share them with the public in 2022.
Airbus 1Q2025 results: So far, so good, but US tariffs make future results unpredictable
May 1, 2025, © Leeham News in Toulouse: Airbus CEO Guillame Faury and CFO Thomas Toepfer presented the Airbus 1Q2025 results yesterday. All Airbus divisions performed to plan, producing a group EBIT Adjusted of 0.6bn Euro.
The company delivered 136 aircraft, which was to plan. The lower deliveries than last year (142) were due to CFM’s extra delivery efforts in 4Q2024, leading to fewer LEAP deliveries for 1Q2025. EBIT at €0.5bn and Free Cash Flow at -€0.3bn were also as planned.
The big unknown going forward is the effect of the US tariffs and the trade war it has caused. Airbus CEO, Guillaume Faury, said, “Airbus will not cover tariffs applied to Airbus aircraft that are imported to the US for US customers (read A330 and A350). For A220s and A320s produced in Mobile for US customers, tariffs apply for parts that must be imported to produce these aircraft. The effects are here less clear as the tariff situation can change at any time”.
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 18.
By Bjorn Fehrm
April 18, 2025, ©. Leeham News: We do a Corner series about the state of developments to improve the emission situation for Air Transport. We try to understand why development has been slow.
We examine the non-CO2 effects of Air Transport that contribute to global warming. Over the last weeks, we have looked at contrails, which have the largest impact on global warming, larger than CO2, Figure 1.
NOx is a smaller contributor, but it contributes about 20% of the total to Global Warming.
Figure 1. A summary of the CO2 and non-CO2 Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF) contributions from Air Transport. Source: The report “The contribution of global aviation to anthropogenic climate forcing for 2000-2018” by Lee et al. (2021).
How good is the C929?
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By Bjorn Fehrm
April 14, 2025, © Leeham News: The COMAC C919 is finding its first customers outside China. At the same time as COMAC has started work on shorter and longer versions of the C919, work on a widebody C929 has been going on for the last 14 years.
If the development of more family members for the single aisle C919 is straightforward, the widebody C929 development has presented several challenges.
Figure 1. The COMAC C929 widebody aircraft. Source: COMAC.
Summary:
- The C929 has been in development since 2011.
- The project was first delayed by Russia-China relations and recently by increasing tensions between China and the West.
- The latest problems are around the engines, as Western engines have become politically impossible.
Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 15.
March 21, 2025, ©. Leeham News: We do a Corner series about the state of developments to improve the emission situation for Air Transport. We try to understand why development has been slow.
After covering alternative propulsion concepts to lower CO2 and NOx emissions, we now study air transport’s non-CO2 effects on global warming. Of these, contrails have the largest impact.
Contrails form when aircraft gas turbine engines emit soot particles into low-temperature water vapor-saturated areas in the atmosphere. The soot particles form condensation nuclei, and the developed droplets freeze to ice crystals that form contrails.
Figure 1. The net Radiative Forcing of flights during 2019. Source: The report “Global aviation contrail climate effects from 2019 to 2021” from 2024.
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 12.
By Bjorn Fehrm
March 7, 2025, ©. Leeham News: We do a Corner series about the state of developments to replace or improve hydrocarbon propulsion concepts for Air Transport. We try to understand why the development has been slow.
Last week, we wrote about Pratt & Whitney’s announcement in January: their trials with critical components of their HySIITE engine, Figure 1, showed that they could increase the efficiency of a hydrogen burn engine by 35%!
It does this by intelligently using the water released when hydrogen oxidizes with the air’s oxygen. The water separated from the exhaust is reheated into steam and entered into the engine’s combustion, reducing NOx by 99.3% and increasing the engine efficiency by 35%.
Figure 1. A HySIITE engine with its backflow core part. Source: Pratt & Whitney.
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 11.
By Bjorn Fehrm
February 28, 2025, ©. Leeham News: We do a Corner series about the state of developments to replace or improve hydrocarbon propulsion concepts for Air Transport. We try to understand why the development has been slow.
Last week, we discussed the fact that Airbus has moved its hydrogen-fueled ZEROe aircraft into the 2040s and that it will be fuel cell based. It’s a bit of an irony that Pratt &Whitney announced major news for the alternative hydrogen burn alternative four weeks before. Let’s dissect what Pratt & Whitney announced.
Figure 1. Hans von Ohain’s first jet engine started on hydrogen in 1937. Source: Wikipedia.
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 10.
By Bjorn Fehrm
February 21, 2025, ©. Leeham News: We do a Corner series about the state of developments to replace or improve hydrocarbon propulsion concepts for Air Transport. We try to understand why the development has been slow.
Last week, we reviewed the present fallout of lower emission projects that have not reached their goals and where investors, therefore, have decided not to invest further.
There is a well-known project failing every month at the present pace. Some recent ones: Universal Hydrogen’s ATR conversions, Volocopter and Lilium’s bankruptcies, Airbus freezing the CityAirbus eVTOL (Figure 1) and pushing out the ZEROe hydrogen airliner, hibernation of the Alice battery aircraft, etc. There will probably be more in the coming months.
Airbus 2024 results: “A decent year in a challenging environment”.
By Bjorn Fehrm
February 20, 2025, © Leeham News in Toulouse: The headline uses the words of Airbus CEO Guillame Faury when he opened the presentation of Airbus 2024 results in Toulouse today. It was a session where Faury and the CFO Thomas Toepfer put in an effort to let all present international journalists and their online colleagues ask all questions and deliver honest answers.
On the business-as-usual side, the company delivered 766 aircraft, which was within the guidance, after a deep grab effort in 4Q, leading to low deliveries for 1Q2025. EBIT at €5.4bn and Free Cash Flow at €4.5bn were also within guidance.
In general, the Commercial airplane side was fighting specific supply problems during 2024, which might limit the ramp-up of A350s and A220s going forward, more of which below. Helicopters have now recovered from challenging times and delivered a solid result. Defense and Space are strong in Air Power (fighters, etc.), given the tense European situation, with Space going through restructuring, which might include mergers with other European space players.
The real news was the reasons for pausing the CityAirbus eVTOL program, according to Faury, “not only because batteries were not where they should have been but also due to the lack of a market for this type of transportation.” As the world’s largest supplier of helicopters, Airbus is a credible source for such a lack of market statement.
Faury also detailed what is happening on the Hydrogen side. Due to slower-than-expected progress in Green Hydrogen production build-up, deployment of preparatory Ground Support Equipment (GSE), and Transportation using hydrogen at the airports in their H2 partner network, Airbus has decided to push out the entry into service of a “commercially viable hydrogen aircraft” by five to ten years.
However, said Faury, it has made progress. “We have reached TRL 3 for the tecnobricks, which has enabled us to select the Fuel Cell path as the preferred way forward. This means these activities are continued at the present level or even intensified, but it also means other paths (read Hydrogen burn) are ramped down. Overall, it means a decrease in R&D spending for Hydrogen activities in the coming years.”