Leeham News and Analysis
There's more to real news than a news release.
Leeham News and Analysis
- Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 28. June 27, 2025
- Parent agency, FAA often at odds as politics outweighs safety June 26, 2025
- Electric Flight and the Ugly Duckling June 25, 2025
- Engine makers tout “Plan A” but have “Plan B” backups in R&D June 23, 2025
- Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 27. June 20, 2025
UTC media day 2: GTF hits 99.5% dispatch reliability rates
June 7, 2016: The new Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbo Fan, on seven Airbus A320neos,
Bob Leduc, president of Pratt & Whitney.
have achieved more than 2,000 revenue cycles with no returns or rejected take-offs, says Bob Leduc, president of Pratt & Whitney. The engines have a 99.5% dispatch reliability. The last time this level was achieved was with the introduction of the Boeing 777, which at the same point had a 100% dispatch reliability rate.
UTC media day 2: PW addresses Under-Performing supply chain
Day 2 of the United Technologies Corp (UTC) Media Days is focused on Pratt & Whitney.
June 7, 2016: Pratt & Whitney officials today clarified an eye-popping statement yesterday by Greg Hayes, CEO of parent United Technologies, that 44% of the suppliers on the new Geared Turbo Fan engine were performing to goals.
Wells Fargo sees reasonable, risky production rates
June 7, 2016: Single-aisle production rates of 57/mo at Boeing and 60/mo at Airbus are
reasonable when achieved in the near term but more problematic in 2019. Wide-body production rate hikes are risky.
This is the conclusion of a short research note issued June 1 by Wells Fargo Securities.
“Higher Rates Sustainable,” WFS writes. “Aircraft deliveries have historically been cyclical, yet Boeing and Airbus have had flat-to-rising deliveries for 12 years–and both forecast higher near-term deliveries. The bottom line is that the OEMs’ forecasts can be reasonable in our view, assuming aircraft retirement levels and/or traffic growth are above historical rates. Therefore, we expect higher deliveries over the next several years, but think it is unlikely that the full 35-40% A320/737 production increase currently envisioned by the OEMs will be achieved by 2020.”
UTC media day 1: Intelligent aircraft, aftermarket support
June 6, 2016: Intelligent aircraft–systems that communicate more fully within the aircraft
Mauro Atalla, UTC Aerospace Systems
and between the aircraft and the ground–is increasing and it requires more and more power to achieve, says Mauro Atalla, vice president, engineering and technology-sensors and integrated systems of UTC Aerospace Systems.
Intelligent sensors on an aircraft have been reduced in the number on board an aircraft even as the needs greatly increase, he said. There has been a reduction of more than 50%, providing a 50% weight reduction.
UTC media day 1: UTAS, twice the size of any other aerospace systems company
Note: United Technologies Corp (UTC) is holding its annual Media Days today and tomorrow. We’re providing reporting from the event. This is the first time in our long participation that UTC Aerospace Systems is presenting. UTAS is a major supplier and service provider to all the airframe OEMs.
June 6, 2016: UTC Aerospace Systems is just four years old, following mergers with
Dave Gitlin, CEO of UTC Aerospace Systems (UTAS).
Hamilton Sundstrand and Goodrich–the largest in aerospace history, says Dave Gitlin, president of UTC Aerospace Systems.
UTAS provides electrical power and bleed air systems, engine, starters, power systems, all the circulating fans on the Boeing 787, monitoring systems and much more. Evacuation slides, the Ram Air Turbines, landing gear, flaps and slat control systems, brakes and thrust reversers.
Pontifications: The Bottom Line isn’t always about The Bottom Line
By Scott Hamilton
June 6, 2016, © Leeham Co.: Sweetheart deals to win strategic aircraft orders are nothing new in commercial aviation.
John Leahy, COO-Customers for Airbus, last week poked Bombardier for its order from Delta Air Lines. Citing a reported airplane sales price of $22m, which Leahy estimated cost BBD $7m per airplane, Airbus’ chief salesman—known for his barbs and quips—said if BBD sold more C Series faster, the company would go out of business quicker.
Set aside for the moment the numbers he cited as unknown quantities. LNC has different figures we’ve reported and in two posts on my column at Forbes, here and here, there are other aspects to the Delta deal that affect economics.
It’s undisputed that BBD took a US$500m charge against the Delta, Air Canada and AirBaltic deals. The second Forbes post explains why. It’s all about the learning curve. Airbus and Boeing know about this: the first A350s are being chalked up to big losses and the 787 has $29bn in production costs. But it’s not to their benefit to acknowledge this when criticizing the C Series deals.
All this is neither here nor there, however. Airbus, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas all have (had) done deals that don’t seem to make commercial sense when key, strategic transactions were necessary.
Airbus stepping up innovation
By Bjorn Fehrm
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Introduction
June 6, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: In January last year I had a discussion with Airbus CEO Fabrice Bregier regarding the innovation level at Airbus. The background to the discussion was that Airbus was trailing its direct competitor, Boeing Commercial Airplanes, in innovations since the early 2000s.
Airbus started life as a more innovative company than Boeing. It was using new technology in an aggressive way to gain product advantages on the incumbent Boeing. Examples are the universal use of Fly-By-Wire (FBW) and the standardization on a common cockpit layout for all its aircraft, whether single or dual aisle, Figure 1.
Figure 1, Airbus A320 cockpit laying the ground for a common cockpit standard. Source: Wikipedia.
The FBW and common cockpit enabled customer pilots to cover a wider range of aircraft with minimal training. Airbus also led the aerodynamic development with high aspect ratio wings for its A320 and A330/340 series aircraft.
Somewhere during the problems with the A380, the creative and innovative spirit got caught in the aim to unify the group, to make sure that the “I make it my way” initiatives stopped in the different national industries that made up Airbus.
Bjorn’s Corner: Transponders, the kingpin of safe air navigation, Part 3.
By Bjorn Fehrm
June 3, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: Over the past few weeks, we have described how transponders go from being little more capable than the WW2 IFF that they were developed from, to how they will act as information beacons, sending the aircraft’s ID, position and speed to all surrounding listeners every second.
The consequences of this change are nothing short of revolutionary. From a situation where the ground controller or adjacent aircraft had scarce information on the multitude of aircraft they tried to track, Figure 1, they can now receive all the information they need from the aircraft under observation.
Figure 1. NASA simulation of air traffic over US on a normal day. Source: NASA
This, together with other technologies like data link-based communication, will change Air Traffic Management as we know it.
Boeing: no new technical issues with KC-46A
Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of The Boeing Co. Boeing photo.
June 2, 2016: Boeing is not discovering more technical issues with the KC-46A, but recent issues relating to the refueling boom and wing pods are being worked through while concurrent production progresses.
“As we discover things in flight tests, we have to roll them into the airplanes. This will be a wide-body program for decades,” he said, forecasting sales of 400 tankers, said Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of The Boeing Co., speaking at the Bernstein Thirty-Second Annual Strategic Decisions Conference 2016.
IATA on air safety
By Bjorn Fehrm in Dublin
Introduction
June 1, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: We report from the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) Annual General Meeting running in Dublin Thursday and Friday this week, where all the world’s airlines meet to report on a number of initiatives and decide on things to do going forward.
The first briefing from IATA was on the level of safety in the air for 2015, measured through the IATA Operational Safety Audit, IOSA. 2015 was a good year, not quite to the level of 2014 which was the safest year in history, but close at 0.32 jet hull losses per one million flights instead of 0.27 recorded for 2014, Figure 1.
Figure 1. Jet hull losses during 2015 per million flight hours. Source: IATA.
As a reference, the the 2013 rate was 0.41 hull losses over one million flights. The 2015 rate was a 30% improvement over the average rate of the years 2010-2014. The turboprop level was worse at 1.29 hull losses per million flights but it was a large improvement compared to previous years at 3.13 and 3.95. It shall be cautioned that the sample size for Turboprops is much smaller than for Jets, therefore one hull loss will affect the statistics quite a lot. Read more