Leeham News and Analysis
There's more to real news than a news release.
Leeham News and Analysis
- A321neo continues upward market share; good luck hitting rate 14/mo for the A220 January 20, 2025
- Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 5. January 17, 2025
- What’s the future of the Boeing 787-8? January 16, 2025
- FAA understaffing affects air operations oversight; NTSB falls short, too January 13, 2025
- Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 4. January 10, 2025
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 5.
By Bjorn Fehrm
January 17, 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.
We have covered why the technical progress of battery-based aircraft has been slow. Now we look at what type of missions it can do this decade and beyond and why the limitations.
Figure 1. The Diamond eDA40 electric trainer. Source: Diamond. Read more
Merry Christmas 2024 and Happy New Year 2025
Leeham News is taking the holidays off. Unless there is some huge breaking news before, we will return on Jan. 6, 2025.
Adams Park in Wheaton, IL USA, across from the Leeham Co. World Headquarters.
Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 1.
By Bjorn Fehrm
October 18, 2024, ©. Leeham News: In Corners over the last years, we have covered new airliner technology and engine developments that would apply to the next-generation airliners in the largest segment of the market, the single-aisle segment, or as we like to call it, the Heart of the Market segment, as it’s not sure it will be a single-aisle aircraft.
The series has assumed this generation will be hydrocarbon-fueled gas turbine-propelled airplanes. Therefore, it has not covered the current state of alternatives to gas turbine-based hydrocarbon propulsion.
We will cover this now. We are now 10 years into the discussions and work of reducing Air Transport’s reliance on hydrocarbon fuels, which started in earnest when Airbus flew the E-Fan battery-electric aircraft at the Farnborough Air Show in 2014, Figure 1.
How are we doing?
Figure 1. Airbus E-Fan at Farnborough Air Show 2014. Source: Wikipedia.
Bjorn’s Corner: New engine development. Part 27. Long developments
October 4, 2024, ©. Leeham News: We do an article series about engine development and why it has longer timelines than airframe development. It also carries larger risks of product maturity problems when it enters service than the airframe of an airliner.
We looked at engine technologies and why several are challenging to bring to a mature technical state. Then, we compared previous engine developments with the present generation. Memory is short. What we could see is that previous generations of engines carried larger reliability and durability problems than the present generation engines.
Now, we discuss the development timelines for key engine versus airframe developments.
Figure 2. The GE-36 Open Fan of the first generation, from 1988. Source: Wikipedia.
Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: New engine development. Part 26. New versus old, Trent 1000 vs. XWB
By Bjorn Fehrm
September 27, 2024, ©. Leeham News: We do an article series about engine development and why it has longer timelines than airframe development. It also carries larger risks of product maturity problems when it enters service than the airframe of an airliner.
In our look at examples of recent developments with problems and these put in a historical perspective, looking at the reliability and durability of its predecessor we compare the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 for the Boeing 787 to the Trent XWB for the Airbus A350.
Figure 1. The Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 with its wide cord hollow titanium fan. Source: Rolls-Royce.
Embraer versus Boeing JV arbitration decision results in $150m cash payment
By the Leeham News team
September 16, 2024, © Leeham News: Embraer issued a short investor release today stating that the arbitration was concluded regarding Boeing’s unilateral termination of the agreement of a Commercial Aircraft Joint Venture and a partnership regarding the C-390 aircraft. Boeing did the M&A termination in April 2020.
The resu
lt is that Embraer will receive a $150 m cash payment from Boeing. The payment is below the market expectations, which were around $300m to cover the Embraer carve out and carve in costs. The issue of the Boeing merger and its effects on Embraer is now history, which is positive even though Boeing’s damages payment was lower than expected.
Embraer will most likely use the cash injection to lower its net debt, which is already at a low $1.3bn and has a leverage to EBITDA of 2.0.
It was in July 2018 that Embraer announced it would sell 80% of its Commercial Aviation business, then valued at a 100% value of $5.25bn to Boeing. The Master Transaction Agreement was signed in January 2019. It included a joint venture for marketing the C-390 Millenium multi-mission military cargo jet.
Bjorn’s Corner: New engine development. Part 24. New versus old, GTF versus V2500
By Bjorn Fehrm
September 13, 2024, ©. Leeham News: We do an article series about engine development and why it has longer timelines than airframe development. It also carries larger risks of product maturity problems when it enters service than the airframe of an airliner.
We have covered the engine’s different parts and their technology challenges. We now look at some examples of recent developments with problems and put them in a historical perspective.
The A330neo for medium haul or twice the frequency with A321XLR? Part 2
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By Bjorn Fehrm
September 12, 2024, © Leeham News: We examine the high-volume short-to-medium-range market and check whether a route previously reserved for the Airbus A330neo can be flown with a fleet of A321XLRs. At equal per-passenger operational costs, doubling the frequency is advantageous and can drive market growth, revenue, and margin.
After comparing the aircraft and their seating, we now use our Airliner Performance and Cost Model (APCM) to fly them on a Southeast Asia route and compare the operating costs.
Summary:
- The A321XLR is competitive on fuel costs but loses out on Cash costs as several cost factors don’t scale linearly with passenger capacity.
- The cost disadvantage doesn’t render the A321XLR a non-replacement for an A330-900; it just needs a positive revenue uptick from the frequency increase to be an interesting alternative.
Bjorn’s Corner: New engine development. Part 20. Temperatures.
By Bjorn Fehrm
August 16, 2024, ©. Leeham News: We do an article series about engine development. The aim is to understand why engine development now has longer timelines than airframe development and carries larger risks of product maturity problems.
To understand why engine development has become a challenging task, we need to understand engine fundamentals and the technologies used for these fundamentals.
We have covered the different areas of a gas turbine except the exhaust (Figure 1). Before we go to the exhaust and the different outputs from a gas turbine Core, we look at the temperatures and how to cope with them in the different sections of a gas turbine.
Figure 1. The gas turbine cycle and its parts. Source: Rolls-Royce: The Jet Engine.
Airbus 1H2024 results: Space business problems lower results
July 30, 2024, © Leeham News: Airbus has presented its results for the second quarter of 2024. The results were impacted by a thorough review of its Space business, which resulted in a quarterly write-off of almost €1bn.
The rest of the group is performing as expected after adjusting for Airbus’ announcement in June that the year’s deliveries of A320/A321 aircraft fell short by 30 units to 770 total, as the supply chain can’t ramp from last year’s 730 to the anticipated 800.
The company announced a 1H2024 profit of 733m€ (1,452m€ 1H2023), on revenue of 28.8bn€ (27.7bn€).
