Powering Large Airliners

With all the three leading global aircraft engine manufacturers, Rolls-Royce, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney, slugging it out for market share, the fight for slice of the large engines segment is poised for interesting times ahead

Aviation history is witness to a massive leap in propulsive power from the Wright Flyer’s 12 horsepower in the year 1903 to GE90-115B, the world’s largest and most powerful engine, delivering the equivalent of 1,45,000 horsepower. GE90 engine was originally certified in 1995 at 84,700 lbs and debuted aboard British Airway’s 777. Since the introduction of Boeing’s longer-range 777 early in the decade beginning in the year 2000, the GE90 has been the best-selling engine for that aircraft family. While General Electric’s CF6 engine has a thrust rating of 68,100 lbs, the GE90 series engines range lies between 76,400 lbs and 1,15,300 lbs thrust. With the increasing size of Boeing 777, the thrust too needed to be increased and which was successfully met by the GE90 series engines. The continued soaring demand resulted in subsequent development of larger engines like GE90-110B1 and GE90-115B variants. These variants tested with thrust in excess of 1,25,000 lbs, being the most powerful derivatives of the GE90, are the sole engines for Boeing’s longer-range and newest models like 777-200LR, 777-200F and 777-300ER. GE90-115B, being 216 inches long and 135 inches wide, is the biggest engine in the world and is the most powerful and efficient wide-body engine in service today. This engine has another record to its credit wherein in the year 1995 it powered the longest commercial flight till date for 22 hours 42 minutes from Hong Kong to London, flying over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Leap into the Next-Generation

Orders for the best-selling aircraft engine combination of Boeing 777 and GE90 has grown to an astounding 225 by the year 2014. The success story of GE90 revolves around several technological feats including carbon fibre composite fan blades. This engine has achieved tremendous success with an extremely low in-flight shutdown (IFSD) rate of 0.001, i.e. one engine IFSD per one million engine flight hours. GE90-115B offers significantly reduced fuel consumption with the hydrocarbon emission down to 40 per cent of the internationally permitted standards. Thus, the success of GE90 has resulted in the engine being the basis for the best-selling General Electric next-generation (GEnx) to power the Boeing 787 and providing the core hot section for the Engine Alliance GP7200 engine for the Airbus A380. This engine has also influenced new CFM International LEAP engine which is the best-selling engine for the Boeing 737 MAX, Airbus A320neo and COMAC C919 aircraft. The GEnx is an advanced dual rotor, axial flow and high bypass engine in production for the Boeing 787 and 747-8 and is supposed to replace the CF6 engine. This engine has a number of weight saving features like fan blades made of composites with titanium leading edges, fan case of composite material and titanium aluminide Stage 6 and 7 LP turbine blades.

Vying for Market Share

While the GE90 series has been maintaining its dominance, Rolls-Royce too with its Trent series of engines has been in the market for aircraft like Boeing 777/787 Dreamliners and Airbus A350/A380. Pratt & Whitney, being the world’s second largest aircraft engine manufacturer by sales ahead of Rolls-Royce and behind GE, has also been contesting wide-body aircraft market segment. Today, the company has over 13,000 engines powering airliners across the world and has logged over a billion flight hours. The company’s advanced, proven technologies including single-crystal super alloy materials, powdered metal disks and full-authority digital electronic control (FADEC), provide excellent operational and environmental performance and durability. The engine meets with noise and emissions regulations currently in force.

Pratt & Whitney’s PW4000 powers the Boeing 747/767 while the Boeing 777-200 is powered by Pratt & Whitney 4077 (77,000 lbs)/Rolls-Royce Trent 877 (76,000 lbs)/General Electric GE90-77B (77,000 lbs), Boeing 777-200 ER has power plants like Pratt & Whitney 4090 (90,000 lbs)/Rolls-Royce Trent 895 (93,400 lbs)/General Electric 90-94B (93,700 lbs). Boeing 777-300ER too is powered by all the three manufacturers with Pratt & Whitney 4098 (98,000 lb), Rolls-Royce Trent 892 (90,000 lbs) and General Electric 90-94B (93,700 lbs) engines.

While GE and Pratt & Whitney continue to dominate the aircraft engine market, both these companies with their 50:50 joint venture, The Engine Alliance, have come up with Alliance GP7200 a twin spool axial flow turbofan that delivers 70,000 pounds of thrust to power the Airbus A380 aircraft. The GP7200 family is a by-product of two of the most successful wide-body engine programmes in aviation history, i.e. the GE90 and PW4000 families. Certified at 81,500 lbs thrust, the engine has proven technologies and incorporates lessons learned from more than 25 million flight hours of safe operation on both engines. The GP7200 entered service in 2008 with Emirates and the first GP7200-powered A-380 was delivered to Air France the following year. The GP7200 has demonstrated very high reliability and has not had a single in-flight engine shutdown.

Success of the GE90 has not made GE engineers rest on their laurels and they continued with their quest of making the engine bigger and more powerful. Fourteen years after the Boeing’s gift to General Electric to become the sole provider of engines for its longer range 777 variant, history once again repeated with GE getting the shot at next-generation 777X. The manufacturer is developing GE9X to power Boeing’s next-generation 777X aircraft. Although this decision of Boeing in favour of GE9X, despite Rolls-Royce’s determined bid with all new 1,00,000 lbs thrust class engine, is at the cost of the competition among the engine manufacturers. The outstanding success of GE90-115B powered versions doesn’t leave any room for argument about the objectivity and credibility of this decision by Boeing.

New Products and Partnerships

With the development and testing of the GE9X, General Electric is going to maintain its dominance on the Boeing 777. GE is expected to run the first version of a new core for the GE9X during next year while freezing the design sometime around 2015 and engine entering testing in 2016. With the Japanese financial company Mitsui & Co being the first strategic partner to join GE9X engine development programme, General Electric is going great guns in perpetuating its leadership. Rolls-Royce too is on the roll with Trent XWB-97 engine to be used on the A350-1000 aircraft. The Trent XWB has turned out to be the success story among all Trent types for Rolls-Royce with around 1,500 engines already sold. Since the starting of the Trent XWB programme in 2006, the engine has been successfully tested in different parts of the world in extreme climatic conditions. The engine is claimed to be the most fuel-efficient in the world and was used to power the Airbus A350 XWB aircraft that took to the skies for the first time on June 14 this year.

While the Trent XWB engines power the A350-800 and the A350-900, Trent XWB-97 mentioned earlier, is the higher thrust version for A350-1000. Trent XWB is to deliver exceptional life-cycle fuel efficiency and reduce environmental impact with its state-of-the-art design features which include contra-rotation, low hub-tip ratio swept fan and advanced compressor aerodynamics. Earlier series Rolls-Royce Trent engines too have been successfully powering wide-bodied jets. The Trent 800 engines having thrust ranging from 75,000 to 95,000 lbs and with over 500 engines on 225 aircraft in service, is the market leader on the Boeing 777 aircraft with over 41 per cent market share. With more than half the operators selecting the Trent 900 engine, it is also the engine of choice for the Airbus A380 aircraft.

In the year 2004, Boeing had to select both Rolls-Royce and General Electric for its 787 aircraft, owing to the customer preference for competition as against acceptance of monopoly of a single engine manufacturer. For this, Rolls-Royce came up with the Trent 1000 programme with partners like Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Industria de Turbo Propulsors, Carlton Forge Works, Hamilton Sundstrand and Goodrich Corporation. This partnership resulted in Rolls-Royce with Trent 1000 engine being selected as the engine supplier in October 2004. The Trent 1000-TEN (thrust, efficiency and new technology), an enhanced version of Trent 1000, is technologically influenced from the latest Trent XWB engine. This engine with a capability to deliver 78,000 lbs is to power all the members of the Boeing 787 series. Whereas, GE Aviation’s market share revolves around CF6 and GE90 engines, which power wide-bodied Boeing and Airbus aircraft; market share of Rolls-Royce’s is perpetuated by Trent series of engine powering Boeing 747, 757, 777 and the 787 Dreamliner. Thus, with all the three leading aircraft engine manufacturers in the world slugging it out for the market share, the fight for slice of the large engines segment is poised for interesting times ahead.