Hamilton Sundstrand chief executive Alain Bellemare sat down with Flight Daily News and discussed his view of the marketplace and the future of the more-electric architecture the company supplies for the Boeing 787.
How do you see the market right now? Is business flat? Are you still waiting for that bounce?
Stabilising right now, that's what I'm seeing, it's kind of bouncing back at the bottom. Last year was clearly coming down month after month, quarter after quarter, but what I've seen in the first half up to now is that some markets are slightly up. Our industrial market is up a little bit, our aftermarket is up year over year, we have some signs that things are starting to come back again.
There's some significant fluctuations into the system, but it's not coming down any more, it's maybe down a month, but it's back up. There are a lot of uncertainties in the market, maybe it's my impression that we've reached a bottom.
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How do you define those uncertainties?
The emerging markets, all those are important for us, but that's not what's going to drive our business over the next two to three years. Most of our business is really between the Americas and Europe, as there are a lot of unknowns about what's going to happen in Europe. That's driving some really big question marks into the marketplace. It's tough to predict, but if you look at what you've seen in the first half, clearly better than 2009, and unless something goes wrong, I think that the second half is going to be better, year over year, than 2009.
I'd say we are in a slow recovery mode, there might be some more dip, but I'm not sure it's going to be a major, what people call a "double dip", I'm not sure about that, but I'm not an economist. I just try to run the business as best I can.
Are you seeing an uptick in the development space from OEMs?
I think that in our case we've been pretty stable at about a billion dollars a year, year over year, so that's a lot of money into new programmes. We have about a dozen programmes in the development pipeline, so it's pretty full. The good news is that the phasing of these programmes is very complementary.
As we have the 787 phasing out, then we have the A350, the CSeries, the MC-21, the Comac C919, the Gulfstream G650 phasing in, so we try to keep the balance on the [engineering and design] side. The key here is if you look at what is going to happen to us over the next five years, we will obviously benefit from the global economic recovery, but we will also add another thing that will drive our business significantly - all the new programmes that we've been working on over the last three to five years are going to come to fruition and are going to enter the market over the next five years and that is going to be a big driver of our future growth.
How are you bringing the 787-8 lessons learned over to the -9?
On the -9 we've been working very closely on the -8, we're doing very well, we're on our way to a final certification with Boeing. All the work we've done on the electric side at our aircraft integration lab in Rockford [Illinois] has been paying off, so I would say the first thing that we're going to benefit on the -9 is experience.
It's the knowledge base that we're going to be leveraging from the -8 to the -9 and it's a simple word here like "experience", but it's very profound, all the lessons from the -8 are going to move on to the -9, so that by itself is going to be a big deal. It's going to help us be more efficient on the development side and lower costs, and we'll be able to better fit the products from a performance standpoint.
The second thing is commonality, we're going to leverage and reuse, working very closely with Boeing, the systems we have on the -8 as much as we can on the -9. This is Boeing's intention and we're fully aligned behind that. That's a second significant driver. Third, we have more technology today, more systems today, our integration capabilities are higher today, so I think the -9 is going to benefit from all of that.
Has Hamilton Sundstrand found that the more electric architecture is scalable down to the narrowbody market?
As we are getting more data from the flight test on the 787-8 and we are understanding the benefits even more and better, it's a tough question to answer today. But one thing that I can say for sure is the concept of not bleeding the engine is a very good concept and from an energy management standpoint it makes a lot of sense.
So the question is, "Where is the threshold?" At which level does it make more sense to have a bleedless aircraft versus going to a more conventional architecture? So that's what we're working on. We're working on the trade-offs and where would a more electric architecture apply and working obviously internally because we've got a lot of expertise in-house to be able to do that, but also working with our customers.
From a technology standpoint, is your systems development for a narrowbody platform being driven separately from your customers, are you gearing up for an anticipated demand for a more electric architecture on a narrowbody product?
I'm not sure. We're trying to stay in synch with customers as much as we can, but the discussion on narrowbodies is relatively new. One player is talking about re-engining so it probably means limited changes to the system. Boeing has been talking about potentially a new aircraft, but it's still very early in my view.
Our role is to make sure that when our customers are ready to move ahead with a new aircraft that we have the technology ready for them that would bring the benefits that they're expecting from these new systems. So I would say on the balance there's probably being more work done internally in our advanced engineering organisation.
What has Hamilton Sundstrand done to prepare for the aftermarket support on the new aircraft types coming into the market?
We have a very comprehensive maintenance programme that we design specifically for customers. So depending on what they want we have a menu of options. So we are very well positioned from that standpoint. As you look, for example, at the 787 coming into service, we've been working with aircraft. So we've got a very comprehensive process and plays to support all these new platforms coming into the market and I would say this is one of our strengths.
We're going to launch in the second half of 2010 a customer response centre. It's going to be located in Windsor Locks. It's going to be operating 24/7 and it's going to cover all customers around the world that are flying our systems. So it's going to be one phone call, one place to call and we are going to take care of the situation from one location around the world, and we are going to do an official opening in the second half of this year.
Is 787's introduction, and the support of its new electrical architecture, a big driver for the new customer response centre?
A: We obviously have to pay special attention when you introduce new technologies into the marketplace and there are many new technologies on [the 787], so add dedicated technical teams that are focused only on the new components that are coming into service, for example, related to the 787. So we pay special attention to that.
But the reason we're launching the customer response centre is because we have content today, on 80% of all the aircraft flying in the Western world. And we have so many components, and systems, and subsystems flying today so what we wanted to dowhat I wanted to do is give all of our customers around the world one point of contact if for whatever reason they have a problem with some of our systems they can call to that number and right there will have technical people, we will have the commercial people, we will have the logistics people in place, ready to help.
Source: Flight Daily News
