Category: Aviation

EADS, Euro Governments at Odds on A350 Outsourcing

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In an attempt to cut costs, and deal with the falling US dollar, EADS is looking at aggressively outsourcing to the US and cheap overseas countries, and the governments that generally back Airbus are saying that their backing is contingent on local manufacture (Paid Subscription Required).

This is not surprising. Boeing and its partners aggressively pursued all sorts of tax abatements and set asides with the 787, and you would never expect (for example) Georgia to pay for a plant in North Carolina.

I would also add, as Peter Hintze, the German aerospace secretary, that Boeing’s distributed base has thus far proved a major disappointment.

Daimond Aircraft/Thielert Engine Update

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Daimond aircraft announced its new Austro Engine AE300 2.0 170hp diesel, which uses the same Mercedes diesel based block as the Thielert engine, to replace Thielert’s Centurion engine at the ILA 2008 air show.

The comments from Christian Dries, chief executive of Diamond, were very informative:

Why did we start our own engine development programme? Answering his own question, Dries said: “Well, it was not our intention to invest €40m in the factory, I’d rather have saved the money. But the TBO of the Centurion 2.0 was becoming very short. It would almost be cheaper to operate with a twin turboprop…”
On a potential certification date, Dries says: “As soon as possible. As you can see it’s close. It has to be if we are flying three aircraft into the show on them.

From the article, it is clear that the negotiations between Diamond and Thielert have been contentious, and I’m inclined to take Diamond’s side, as we now have reports that the bankruptcy administrator is gouging on parts that were covered by warranty:

Now comes Kuebler [the bankruptcy administrator] to revise the rules in such a way as to leave owners not just in the cold, but with virtually no financial support of any kind. We’re told that as of mid-May, a Thielert 2.0 diesel still costs about 33,000 Euros or just over $52,000. That sounds like a huge sum and it is– twice the cost of a Lycoming overhaul for equivalent horsepower. But the diesel’s fuel specifics are favorable enough to offset the higher cost over an avgas engine on a lifecycle basis. Or at least they used to be.

Now, Thielert no longer warrants the engines or parts. When you come up on the 300-hour gearbox requirement, they’ll sell you a new one at $16,000 or an inspected one for $7800—if you wire the money to Germany upfront and arrange for your own shipping. On your Maalox-powered run to the 1000-hour TBR, you get to do that three times, plus the cost of the pumps, alternator, shipping and who knows what else. If you go to 2400 hours on the new 2.0 engine, do it seven times. The gearboxes alone have the potential of more than doubling the cost of the engine to nearly $100 an hour—and that’s before you buy fuel. What this means, in my view, is that Thielert’s management needed help in killing the company for good, Kuebler seems to be providing it. The part about no warranty support for anything is especially galling to owners.

“Does this mean that if I buy a $16,000 gearbox that’s no good, my only recourse is to buy another one?” one angry owner asked me this week. It evidently means exactly that, which is why Diamond, in a bulletin to owners, accused the bankruptcy firm of being more interested in short term cash flow than long term survival of Thielert and making its customers reasonably whole.

So it sounds to me like they are trying to suck the marrow out of the bones.

In any case, the fact that the reduction gears need replacement after 300 hours and a 1000 hour TBO seem to be a large part of the reason that they are in trouble. The warranty claims killed them.

According to Bloombert, Thielert has resumed spares shipments to customers, but I wonder how much of this is just inventory that they are selling off in attempt to make a quick few bucks.

Pity…It seemed like a promising technology, but 300 hours on a $16,000.00 gearbox? Ouch.

Northrop Grumman’s Secret X-Bomber

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DTI editor Bill Sweetman looks at some contracts floating around the aerospace world, and has condluded that Northrop Grumman has been awarded “a classified Air Force contract to develop a secret bomber prototype”, likely based on the now canceled J-UCAS program, probably based on the X-47B that NG is making for the Navy as a part of the UCAS-D program that succeded the J-UCas:

He has a more detailed article here (Requires loading of proprietary Nxtbook reader), which indicates that the bomber would have a roughly 2000 mile range with a 14-28K pound bombload, which makes it about 1/2 the size of the B-2, and he theorizes that there may be some advances in terms of CFD and control systems.

Of course, the one question that does not get answered is why we really need this.

Dutch Parliament Throws a Monkey Wrench into JSF Acquisition

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The government won approval to buy their first two F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, but they cannot spend more than 10% of the money allocated until they conduct a, “the government conducts a new, open and transparent evaluation of alternatives to the JSF,” with the involvement of experts outside their ministry of defense.

I think that this all comes down to the increasing realization that the JSF is going to cost a lot more than was initially promised.

Russian Advanced Helo Concepts

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The Russians are looking at advanced high speed helicopter concepts too (Paid Subscription Required):


Mil Mi-X1

Among the concepts are:

  • The Mi-X1, a 5 ton class aircraft with a top speed of around 450-500 km/h.
  • The Kamov Ka-92 which uses a coaxial rotor with retreating blades offloaded, much like Sikorsky’s X2 demonstrator.
  • The Ka-90, which has a rotor which folds down along the fuselage for high speed (700 km/h) flight.

A330 MRTT Winning on World Market

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This article (Paid Subscription Required) notes that the A330 is racking some very impressive sales, even when not considering the US tanker buy, with purchases by Australia (5 tankers), the UK (14 tankers), the UAE (3 tankers), and Saudi Arabia (3 tankers).

For the last two, it is the UAE’s first foray into tankers, and a major move away from US equipment for the House of Saud.

It looks like the Japanese and Italians, who bet on the US selecting the 767, may be the odd men out on all this.

They would be anyway, as the Boeing tanker proposal was significantly different from that they bought.

Innovative Helo Update

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Flight International is reporting that Sikorski’s X2 technology demonstrator is doing ground tests on its rotor system, and that Boeing’s A160T helo drone set an endurance record (18.7 hours) this month.

The former uses coaxial blades to offload the retreating blades, and allows for increased top speed, and the latter uses a variable speed rotor to increase efficiency to match the needs of the specific flight regime.

X2 technology demonstrator


A160 T

Airbus A350 Updates

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We have some rumors that the A350 is significantly overweight, to the tune of about 8 tonnes.

I’m inclined to believe that it is overweight at this point, much of the work in development at this point is about refining the design and saving weight, but 8 tonnes on an aircraft with an empty weight somewhere around of 105 tonnes, even at this relatively early stage, seems to be excessive.

Related to this, Airbus is announcing that it will be able to, “finalise the A350 XWB’s ‘aero-lines’” in July, but that it will continue to “refine” the wing of the A350-1000, the largest, and last to be delivered, variant over the next two years.

Airbus is claiming no “major” changes for the -1000 wing, simply mods to the pylons and the high lift devices (flaps and slats), but with 20% greater max gross weight, I’m inclined that some more significant differences may creep in over the next 2 years.

Indian AWACS

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You have a report on India’s efforts to improve its surveillance and command control assets, where they appear to be heading towards a two tiered system.

First they are developing an AWACS system based on the IL-76/A-50 with Israel’s phased array Phalcon system in a conventional, though non-rotating dome:

They are also looking at procuring a smaller, somewhat less capable system, likely the EMB 145 Erieye:

The theory here is that this allows them to have more assets available at any given time, with the more capable assets only needing to be deployed where the improved capabilities (range, endurance, and more radar operators) are required.

Spirit AeroSystems Snags Airbus A350 Fuselage Section 15

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Sprint just signed a contract with Airbus to design and build this component. (See picture below)

The kicker is that until 2005, Spirit was Boeing, but they spun the company off to appease shareholders, and now the expertise, including experience with the complex composite structures it developed for the 787, will be benefiting Airbus.

Boeing’s aircraft’s current business model appears to be similar to the Lead System Integrator (LSI) concept that has consistently underperformed in all of its large defense related contracts so badly that Congress is looking to ban the practice.

Norway Protests: We Are Having a Real Fighter Competition

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The Norwegian air force chief of staff Major General Stein Erik Nodeland is now aggressively combating the idea that Norwas has already decided to buy the F-35 JSF.

This perception is why Eurofighter pulled out of the bid about a year ago, leaving the improved Gripen as the only other competitor.

I think that if one looks at the bid process objectively, there certainly are segements of the Norwegian air defense establishment who have settled on the JSF, to the extent that they are using Lockheed-Martin F-35 powerpoint slides in their presentations, though there are indications that the some members of Parliament are not amused.

Revolutionary Aero Engine Concepts

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Kind of a follow up to yesterday’s post, also sourced from Aviation Week (Paid Subscription Required)

Basically, these technologies involve unsteady combustion, specifically pulse detonation and wave rotors, which can, in whole or in part, use meticulously controlled combustion to replace a conventional compressor:

As with PDEs and pulse combustors, the wave rotor concept hinges on the idea of increasing the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine by producing a pressure rise during the combustion process. In conventional gas turbines, the pressure reduces as the gas is burned in the combustor, resulting in an entropy gain or a reduction in efficiency. In a wave rotor, combustion takes place via pressure waves in a confined volume within a series of tubes or channels. This means the pressure of the gas rises because combustion occurs inside a limited or constant volume, thereby increasing the overall efficiency of the engine.

Although wave rotors and PDEs both rely on detonation shock waves traveling down the length of the tube to transfer energy, the two devices use this energy in slightly different ways. The PDE allows the blast wave to exit from the device as part of the propulsive effect, while the wave rotor merges successive waves to raise the pressure of the gas before it exits to the turbine stage.

The wave rotor consists of a series of tubes or passages arranged around the axis of a cylindrical drum which rotates between two fixed end plates. The plates contain the ports, or manifolds, which control the flow of the gas through the tubes. As the drum rotates, the ends of the channels are intermittently exposed to the ports which are at different pressures. This phase shift sets up the compression and expansion waves within the tubes as the mixture is ignited. The result is an expansion wave that travels into the gas and flows out of the wave rotor combustor into the turbine inlet at a total pressure more than 20% higher than that of the air delivered by the compressor.

As a result of the pressure gain from the wave rotor, more work can theoretically be extracted from the downstream turbine, increasing overall engine thermal efficiency. A key factor is that, as the combustion is contained within the tubes of the wave rotor, the pressure rise of the gas is not accompanied by a major increase in temperature, thereby keeping levels within the limits of the standard turbine materials.

Furthermore, experiments at NASA, as part of its ultra-efficient engine technology (UEET) study, indicate that because of the rapid expansion of the pressure wave, the gas temperature spends only a short time at or near stoichiometric conditions. As these represent ideal burning conditions for the fuel-air mix, they also coincide with the greatest production of nitrogen oxides (NOx), a major pollutant and focus for aviation emissions reduction efforts.

The wave rotor has the advantage that it smooths out the pulses before feeding it into a turbine.

Additionally, NASA is looking at pulsed propulsion for launch systems.

They are looking at a variable cycle engine where at slow speeds the afterburner would be fed by core air, and and at high mach numbers, would be fed off the fan, which is vaguely similar to how the J-58 used on the SR-71 operated.

It has been suggested that a conventional afterburner be replaced with a PDE.