Overweight? Yes, but 787′s also very smart
As you can read over at BNet.com, Boeing engineers are taking flack for the fact that the 787 is overweight — to the point that some airlines have changed their minds about taking the earliest planes coming down the assembly line. They’re opting instead to wait for later models, which presumably will have some subtle changes that will lighten them — and make them better able to meet the ambitious range and fuel-economy goals Boeing set out for the Dreamliner.
But if we’re going to blame the engineering community (both at Boeing and at the suppliers who did much of the design work on this largely outsourced plane) for the weight issue, we also should be crediting them for pulling off a first-of-its-kind engineering feat in aerospace: a common interface for different kinds of jet engines. This is the kind of thing that maybe only a slide-rule packing jet geek could love, but it’s also one of those situations where a smart engineering solution can make a big difference in terms of both dollars and sense.
First, the back story:
Due to some 1930′s vintage anti-trust laws, U.S. companies have long been banned from building both airplanes and aircraft engines. As the industry evolved globally, this model held true, and today there are three big engine-building companies: GE Aviation and United Technologies subsidiary Pratt & Whitney in the United States, and Rolls-Royce in the United Kingdom. These companies — or joint ventures involving them — supply the engines used on all the jets built by Boeing and Airbus (and regional jet builders Bombardier and Embraer too).
For the most part, most industry players have been happy with the arrangement: airlines typically have had choices not only in which type of airplane they fly, but also which types of engines they buy to power them.
But it resulted in a strange quirk: historically, the different engine manufacturers have all used different interfaces between the engines and the aircraft. It’s kind of a technical thing — and I admit to not being a tech-spert myself — but you can sort of picture it in automotive terms. Say you want to put a more-powerful big-block Chevy engine in your Hyundai. First you’ve got to figure out whether it will actually fit in the engine compartment (which on a jet is called a nacelle, by the way). And then, if somehow miraculously it does, you’ve got to rebuild the engine mount so it will stay in place, the drive train so that you’ll have power to turn the wheels, the alternator so that you’ll have electricity to run the headlights and windshield wipers, the transmission so that you can shift gears … basically you’re looking at replacing everything inside the car but the radio, seats, doors and cupholders. It’s possible, but labor-intensive and time-consuming to the point of being impractical.
That was the situation in the past with airliners and their engines, and what it effectively meant was that once a jet had, say, a GE engine installed on its wings, it would always have GE engines. And if the owner of that plane wanted to sell or lease it to an airline that only used Rolls-Royce or Pratt & Whitney engines, they were just out of luck.
With the 787, Boeing set out to design a common system that allowed for much easier swap-outs between engines from the different manufacturers, and it’s now getting to prove just how well this works. Over at FlightGlobal.com, blogger John Ostrower says that the proverbial “unnamed sources” tell him that Chinese airlines that had ordered GE-built GENex engines for their 787s have backed away from a deal to take some of the first planes. Instead, All Nippon Airways will take them, and ANA wants Rolls-Royce Trent 1000s. Historically, this would have been a huge and expensive hassle for Boeing, and probably would have forced it to take the old Chinese planes back out on the market to try to find a new buyer willing to take the GE-powered jets (and probably at a discount). Instead, it’s just placing the new Trents under the wings and delivering the jets to ANA.
Maybe it’s a small win, given all the delays and problems with the 787, but it’s a real victory for both the engineers and bean-counters at Boeing none the less.
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