It’s a 3-Way Race to Build World’s Most Powerful Jet Engine : Aviation: Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and GE in heated competition to power new Boeing 777.
The cavernous building is nicknamed “the cathedral,” with two 46-foot doors that weigh 80 tons each, but outside is where things are supposed to be as quiet as the proverbial church.
Inside, Rolls-Royce PLC tests jet engines, perched high among scaffolding designed like the strut of an airplane wing. It is a high-decibel, china-rattling exercise, as anyone who lives near an airport runway knows.
But the cathedral, a huge modern test bed, is designed to contain the noise and prevent Rolls-Royce’s neighbors from hearing the rumble of aviation history in the making.
Rolls-Royce is running against U.S. rivals Pratt & Whitney and General Electric in a three-way race to build the world’s biggest jet engines: monsters that in testing have delivered more than 100,000 pounds of thrust, a measurement of lifting power.
“You get one of those and it will just about put you into space,” said Dean Breest, a London-based spokesman for Delta Air Lines.
Almost anyway. NASA’s first manned Mercury flights in 1961 were powered by engines with a little less thrust, at 78,000 pounds.
The new jet engines, which can be fatter than the cabin of a 757 jetliner, will be used to power the new Boeing 777 scheduled to start test flights in June.
The 777s are envisioned by Boeing and some airlines as the airplane of the future, serving long-haul routes throughout the Pacific on two engines.
Twin-engine economy has already taken over the Atlantic on routes such as Chicago-Manchester that were unheard of in the days when four-engine 747s ruled the skies between America and Europe.
Someday, carriers might use four of the big engines to power “super-jumbos” that could carry up to 800 passengers, assuming the idea ever makes it past the blueprint stage.
But first, the engines need to be proven. As the manufacturers test things, they are fighting hard for market share.
“It’s a bloody war out there; it’s not just competition,” said John Sandford, managing director of the aerospace group at Rolls-Royce.
The stakes are high.
GE is spending about $1.5 billion to develop its GE90 engine. Rolls-Royce is spending about $1 billion on its Trent series of engines. Pratt is spending $500 million to create the PW4084.
Big price tags, but the payoff could be enormous in a market that should thrive well into the early 21st Century.
Pratt has taken the early lead in the race, with firm orders to outfit 66 Boeing 777s with its PW4084 and 59 options for later purchases. GE reports 44 orders and 28 options for the GE90. Rolls-Royce has 29 orders and 18 options for its Trent 800.
The engine makers are trying to woo Korean Airlines, expected to be the next purchaser this year.
The engines cost airlines around $10 million or more apiece, and the manufacturers estimate airlines will buy $60 billion worth over the next two decades. When sales of parts and repair work is included, this business could be well more than $100 billion.
Although engine makers are always tinkering around to improve their product, the market development manager for GE Large Engines, Vince DioGiovanni, said it’s unusual to have three big companies all trying to pioneer a new type of engine.
This leads to lots of bold claims about how your engine is doing and how the other guy has problems.
Before an important air show this winter, Rolls-Royce proclaimed it had set a world record by running an engine at 106,000 pounds of thrust. Before long, GE claimed to have beaten that with 110,000 pounds.
Pratt, which has tested its biggest engines at around 103,000 pounds, says such grand claims must be qualified, particularly since the engines now sold will need thrust only in the 80,000- to 90,000-pound range.
An engine running at 110,000 pounds thrust in cold weather would be hitting only about 80,000 pounds on an 80-degree day, said Tom Harper, program manager for Pratt’s PW4000 engine series.
Executives at Rolls-Royce and Pratt freely discuss a GE90 engine that failed during a test flight, forcing the pilot to land using his other engines. GE responds with details of a Pratt engine that fell off during testing.
But after a bit of mud has been slung, the engine makers acknowledge that their rivals are making good products and problems are to be expected during testing.
“I think we’ve all got about the same thing--one may have a gnat’s whisker over the other,” Sandford said.
Slight differences, however, add up over thousands of flight hours and years of use. Fuel, parts and maintenance end up costing much more than the engine itself.
“The most fundamental difference between all of us is the strategy by which we approach the size of the engine,” said Tom Harper, program manager for Pratt’s PW4000 engine series.
GE is taking the biggest gamble, designing a new engine the company claims will be more fuel efficient and more easily modified to handle higher thrust levels in coming years.
Pratt, swayed by low oil prices, has come up with an engine that burns slightly more fuel but is touted as needing less maintenance.
Rolls-Royce boasts of a triple-shaft design that keeps its engine smaller than the others, although the thrust level can be increased by merely reprogramming computer software.
The engine makers all claim the competition’s product will be more difficult to retool for different uses in coming years.
Boeing won’t take sides in the debate, letting airlines decide which engine they want.
For the engine maker, it is vital to get customers from the beginning. Once an airline starts buying a certain class of engine, it is virtually hooked on repeat orders because its mechanics will know how to work on that type of engine and parts and engines can be easily swapped around the aircraft fleet.
Also, engines are becoming more reliable and staying on planes longer these days. Twenty-five years ago, it was considered good to keep an engine on the wing for 1,000 hours of service. The parts might be replaced within about seven years.
Now, some engines stay in use as long as 20,000 hours or more without removal for major maintenance, and they can last many more years. Rolls-Royce boasts of one engine that stayed on the wing of a Delta jet for more than 25,000 hours--a record.
