Originally Posted by
Rated De
It may well have been a little more than a 'surge' Mr O'Sullivan.
Many will recall the ANA 787 suffering a double engine failure at Osaka. Fortunately, the software decided to shut it down on the ground. This event is an interesting development.
With engine design a highly competitive and costly enterprise manufacturers are keen to be lighter and more efficient than the other offerings.
Rolls Royce miscalculated the wear rates on the Trent 1000 engines, as it related to the intermediate turbine stage. A separate issue with compressor wear was found. Both components wear far faster than their models predicted.
Airlines will have factored the projected fatigue lives into the maintenance modelling.
Little Napoleon made big fanfare of the 787 operating economics sighting the lower maintenance costs.
“It gives you better economics because it’s 20% more fuel efficient and with a lot lower maintenance cost given the new technology. That means there are routes we could have done before with distance, but couldn’t do economically that now come onto the radar screen.”
When it comes to predicting the future, past performance has proved inaccurate. New technology with little operational exposure is even less able to accurately allow airlines to confidently predict the future.
As Donald Rumsfeld reminded us, "You don't know what you don't know."
From a fleet perspective, Boeing has not identified and resolved the root cause of the 787 electrical fires. Whilst the battery 'box' has been approved and the aircraft flies, the necessary elements of combustion remain.
Perhaps what we are witnessing with Boeing is a normalisation of deviance, in that having little control over engines and batteries the aircraft may have failure points that their design processes have failed to adequately address as they lost process control.
It is too early to tell whether there is a systemic problem with the GenX engine, but one can be sure Boeing will be very concerned; Despite short term savings from outsourcing looking rather elegant on the spread sheet, the risk of reputational damage is all in-house; Boeing will own it.
Airlines like Qantas waiting an eternity for new technology to deliver a comparative advantage may unwittingly have exposed themselves to more risk than their spread sheets predicted.