Pratt & Whitney has an internal plan to exceed delivery targets for the geared turbofan (GTF) engine family this year after falling short of the objective in 2016, says chief executive Greg Hayes of P&W parent United Technologies.
The internal plan would have P&W deliver more GTF engines to the Airbus A320neo and Bombardier CSeries assembly lines than the 350-400 in the publicly released target, Hayes told the Barclay’s Select Industrials conference on 22 February.
“I’m highly confident we’ll get behind” the parts shortages that caused P&W to fall short of delivery targets last year, Hayes says.
P&W built 165 of the 200 engines planned in the 2016 production ramp-up, but only delivered 138 to customers. The 27 undelivered engines lacked fan blades, as P&W grappled with learning how to make the unique hybrid-metallic components fast enough, he adds.
Japanese supplier IHI opened a second factory to produce GTF fan blades in December and began ramping up production in January, Hayes says. A third fan blade factory will open in April when P&W launches a new facility in Lansing, Michigan. Combined, the three sites should create enough production capacity to meet or even exceed delivery targets this year, Hayes says.
The production ramp-up is only one of the near-term challenges P&W is facing as it introduces its first new commercial turbofan engine since the short-lived PW6000 in the late-1990s.
Financially, the GTF production ramp-up is expected to be a major drag on P&W’s balance sheet. The company expects to lose $1 billion overall on 350-400 engine deliveries this year, meaning an average loss of $2.86-$2.5 million per engine. As production rises further the following year, the average loss for each engine delivery should decline to less than $2 million. But the increasing rate of deliveries will lead to a $1.1 billion operating loss on the GTF programme in 2018, Hayes says.
By the end of the decade, P&W expects to be delivering GTF engines at a rate of 1,000 per year, while earning a profit on average for each delivery, Hayes says.
As one of two engines offered for the A320neo and Irkut MC-21 and the exclusive option on the CSeries, Embraer E-Jet E2 and Mitsubishi Regional jet, P&W has collected firm orders for more than 8,000 engines since launching the programme in 2008.
But the engine’s popularity has suffered a bit since the A320neo entered service in January 2016 due to two durability problems. The combustor liner and a carbon air-seal inside the GTF is proving less durable than P&W promised. As a result, the airlines operating 40 GTF-powered A320neos and eight CSeries aircraft so far have had to ground some aircraft temporarily to install new combustor liners. P&W also plans to roll-out a fix for the carbon air-seal problem later this year, causing another round of engine removals across an even larger operating fleet.
“The combustor life has not been what we expected, the carbon seal is not what we expected. We’ve got a lot of removals. Customers are not happy. We are not happy,” Hayes says. “But we’re going to deliver on those engines and this is going to be a great programme for the next 30 years.”
Source: Cirium Dashboard
