Focus on Rolls-Royce Trent engines

Plane Talking has an interesting think piece about the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine that powers the Qantas Airbus A380. As readers know, a Trent 900 had an uncontained failure on QF32 that severely damaged the A380. Qantas still… Read More

US helps Boeing–and Europe helps Airbus. So what?

Notice: All right, Everyone, given the persistent personal stuff in the Comments, we have closed Comments for this posting.   Wikileaks struck again with cables revealing US diplomats and the President support Boeing is sales efforts. The cables… Read More

Looking ahead for the tanker award

Will it ever end? This is the question about the interminable KC-X tanker competition. Unofficial word is now that the USAF is to announce its award in February, after slipping from January, December, November, October and August. US… Read More

2011 Outlook for Aerospace

Note: this is unusually long, 11 pages when printed. The new year is here and it is time for our annual look-ahead for the big OEMs. On a macro level, 2011 should be a good year. Airline passenger… Read More

Senate hearing in tanker snafu appropriate

US Sen. Carl Levin announced yesterday that he will hold a hearing by Feb. 1 into the snafu by the USAF over sending Boeing and EADS information about each other’s KC-X tanker submission. We think this is appropriate,… Read More

Odds and ends: Airbus/EADS and Boeing

With Christmas around the corner, here are some year-end thoughts, absent any breaking news of some kind in the week ahead: 737 upgrade: Southwest Airlines continues to pressure Boeing to do something about a more fuel efficient airplane,… Read More

Outsourcing US Defense

As regular readers know, a major piece of controversy over the prospect of awarding the KC-X contract to EADS North America is the assertion that this will outsource US defense procurement to a foreign company. We’ve noted in… Read More

737NG vs A320neo: an interesting chess game

Update, Dec. 13: FlightGlobal has this interview with Ryanair and its critique of the NEO. Original Post: The (London) Financial Times has this interview with Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Jim Albaugh in which he says there is no… Read More

Lessors, banks in blistering critique of Airbus NEO

Our colleagues at Commercial Aviation Online put together the story below on lessor and banker reaction to the Airbus A320neo announcement December 1. We knew–and previously referenced here–reluctance on the part of these groups to the NEO concept,… Read More

A350 begins fuselage construction, refines program management

Airbus has begun construction of the A350 fuselage. Airbus photo, rendering Airbus also announced refinements in the A350 program management to provide more accountability and coordination. This article describes it in Aviation Week, by Robert Wall.