Boeing 787 engines
 

Houston, do we have a problem?

In the last week 2x ANA 787 engines have failed, one caught fire and one Jetstar one failed causing a diversion to Guam. Any others???

NH609 August 20, 2016
NH959 August 14, 2016
JQ12, August 7, 2016

Not clear whether the 20Aug16 NH609 was a failure, or an inflight precautionary shutdown. While the 14Aug16 ANA looked to be a catastrophic engine failure (lots of fire, parts on the runway), the Jetstar engine was shutdown inflight due to low oil pressure.

All 787, but different engine types. The two NH 787's were Trent 1000's, while the Jetstar was a GE.

During that same time frame 3 A320's, 2 330's, 3 737's, 1 777, and 1 A300, and 1 CRJ all shut down engines inflight (failed??). Engine shutdowns happen all the time.

True. But the fleet size of 787 is a lot smaller and the number of engine cycles they do will be a lot less compared to a 12 sector a day A320/B737 LoCo.

I'm sure there's a clever statistician out there who could work out the maths/probabilities - it's beyond me.

Twelve sectors a day!
Really? Who does that?

is that actually possible?

what's the minimum turn-round time for a 787?

quickest I have seen is about 40 minutes if there is no offload/onload of cargo.

I don't know if anyone does 12 sectors a day consistently. I would guess 8 or 9 would be more realistic number. And yes, vs. a mature engine such as CFM56, which has been around 25+ years, it is a higher number of shutdowns, but still not a trend (2 different engines) vs. another medium-long haul aircraft such as A330 (2 engine shutdowns in same time frame as the 787 in the initial posting).

Low cost UK/Europe - EZY and RYR utilise aircraft from 0500 to 0200. Average use is 10-12 sectors a day. They don't make money on the ground. Turn times are 0:25-0:30 mins.

Of more concern is the implications for ETOPS for the 787. Are the ETOPS authorisations unique to to type or type+type of engine? It would seem pretty harsh to pull 787 ETOPS based on say a number of GE shutdowns if your fleet was fitted with Trents. Anyone know?

Rather than repeat everything, just read this thread:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...erts-guam.html

Short answer, 787 IFSD rate (both GE and RR) is quite good, last week was a statistical fluke.

aren't they all :E

Most ANA B787 flights are domestic, very few are long haul.

EZY's average daily utilisation last year was 11.1 hours per aircraft, and their average stage length was 1 hour 57 minutes, giving an average of 5.69 sectors per day per aircraft.

The $65,000 question must be: how many such engines are in service now?

There are over 440 787's currently in service. Engine split is roughly 50-50 between GE and Rolls, although I think GE has a small majority.

notapilot15 I covered NH when 747SR's were introduced sometime in a prior millenium. Their average stage flight time was 0:45; the outlier was HND-OKA at 2:00. (I rode a couple 747 legs with 500 paying Pax plus babes in arms!)

The B787 fleet is not small by any accepted measure; over 440 in service. Neither is the General Electric GEnx engine pool small; there are well over 1,000 GEnx engines currently in service around the world (it's one of the fastest selling airplane engines of all time) and it has accumulated around 7 million operating hours.
The inflight shut-down (IFSD) requirement for engines under 330 minutes Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards is 0.01 IFSDs per 1000 engine hours, which is the same as 10 shutdowns per million hours. To be clear, that means, on the average, one inflight engine shut-down every 100,000 engine hours. The General Electric GEnx engine exceeds that reliability requirement by more than a factor of three. Its reliability is at or about on a par with more "mature" engines such as the CFM CF6-80C2 (Airbus A300, Airbus A310, Boeing B767), the General Electric GE90 (Boeing B777) and the Pratt and Whitney PW4000 (Airbus A300, Airbus A310, Boeing B747).

David

That's just a mathematical average - never managed .69 of a sector - hope I never do :eek: I can assure you that the aircraft regularly do to 2 lots of 4 sectors. Domestics may be 6 sectors in one FDP.

My point is that the LoCo fleet engines do a lot more start/stop/take-off/Rev cycles than long haul. With the global fleet of LoCo A320/B737's perhaps 5 or 6 times that of the 787, the statistics start to look "interesting".

Of course we're not comparing like with like. It can be spun however you like such is the way with stats.

I think that for the GEnx-1B engine, a couple of fan related problems related to ice shedding and fan imbalance caused shutdowns. This problem was solved by having the engine power increased to 85% N1 periodically when cruising in potential icing conditions with N1 below 85%. Also, a PIP version of the engine produced for certain airlines closed down the fan blade to fan casing clearance, improving SFC. However, that resulted in ice shedding causing fan blade damage and the clearances had to be increased.

Sorry, the only way I know how to calculate averages is mathematically. :O

Figures come from EZY's Annual Report.

Doubtless some of the fleet average that, some of the time ...

Royal Brunei has had two Trents 1000Ae fail and a few replaced according to a mate of mine who works there

According to TBS, ANA will be changing all 50 of their RR Trent engines for the 787, and flight cancellations have started from today. The fan blades develop cracks under a build-up of dirt. This news is being suppressed as we speak, apparently. (JAL has GE engines, so they are not affected, the news source says.)

The content of the main report on TBS (in Japanese) has now disappeared but the earlier one about the series of engine failures with ANA and the need for replacement parts is here: ??? ???????????????????????????News i - TBS??????????
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