Flight-testing has commenced for a modified high-pressure turbine blade for the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 TEN engine, intended to double time-on-wing for the powerplant.
The Trent 1000 TEN is an option for the Boeing 787 family.
Speaking during a half-year briefing, Rolls-Royce chief executive Tufan Erginbilgic said the first test flight took place on 31 July and lasted 1h 15min.
He says the flight was “successful” and that the test programme will continue for eight weeks. The company expects US FAA certification this year.
Rolls-Royce has been striving to improve durability of the Trent 1000 engine, and Erginbilgic is confident that the effort will enable the manufacturer to regain market share lost to the rival GE Aerospace GEnx.
UK flag-carrier British Airways recently opted to take the GEnx for a batch of six 787s, defecting from the Trent 1000 fitted to the rest of its 787 fleet.
Parent firm IAG had referred to the GEnx as “performing well” and having “millions of reliable flight hours under wing”.
“Our issue with the Trent 1000 is not reliability,” says Erginbilgic. “Reliability of this engine is as good as the competitor engine. Time-on-wing has been the issue.”
He says the company’s £1 billion investment initiative – which covers all engines but primarily the Trent 1000 and the Airbus A350-1000’s Trent XWB-97 – is intended to help rebuild market share.
“The flight test is a very significant moment…[when] that is certified, we’ll double time-on-wing,” he states.
Rolls-Royce has also completed design work for further improvements to the Trent 1000 and 7000 which will deliver a further 25-30% time-on-wing improvement by the end of 2025.
“Manufacture of these engine components is already well under way for engine testing,” says Erginbilgic.
He adds that this improvement only requires engine-level – rather than aircraft-level – certification which “is a lot faster – we don’t have to do flight tests with Boeing”.
“Once those two [initiatives] happen, we’ll have a very competitive time-on-wing, equal to our competitor’s, on the Trent 1000,” he states.
Customers need to feel confident in the enhancements, he acknowledges, but with new orders likely to be delivered in 2027 and beyond, Rolls-Royce will be “ready when new deliveries come”.
Erginbilgic states that 50% of the Trent 7000 fleet for the A330neo has already been retrofitted and that, even in harsher environments – such as Kuwait – the engine is “running really, really well”.
“Do we believe we can regain market share? Absolutely,” he says. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have invested in time-on-wing.”
Rolls-Royce has also tested improvement for the Trent XWB-84 for the A350-900 which will improve fuel-burn efficiency, with certification planned later this year for entry-into-service in 2025.
