
Troublesome advanced engines for Boeing and Airbus jets have disrupted airlines - wallflower
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/troublesome-advanced-engines-for-boeing-and-airbus-jets-disrupt-airlines-and-production-lines/
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sgt101
I remember watching a documentary about the design of the trent 1000 and being
amazed by how small the team was. In fact it was held up where I work as a
demonstration of how inefficient we are. But now we see the consequence of
penny pinching short sighted know nothing accountants running a company. How
much has this cost in contrast to an extra 20 engineers on the team?

~~~
southern_cross
Mechanically jet engines are pretty simple devices, though - basically just a
bunch of connected fans. But when covered with wires and pipes and such, they
may look quite complicated at first glance.

What line of business are you in that your team was considered inefficient in
comparison?

~~~
throwaway5752
Do you have any idea how complicated a single turbine blade is? It's a
monocrystal of a superalloy that retains strength at over 1.5k degrees F, and
it has channels for coolant because it operates beyond that temperature.

You're like saying a computer is a bunch of wire and some melted sand between
some copper.

~~~
southern_cross
Once again, you're confusing materials and manufacturing complexity for actual
mechanical complexity. I remember when I first got a close look at a jet
turbine fan blade, and being puzzled by some aspects of it, like the channels
that ran all the way through it. (I remember thinking that those channels must
have been pretty tricky to make.) But then I realized that these were probably
for cooling, like you said. I was most impressed by its relatively complex
shape, and by no doubt the exotic material that it was made of and the tight
tolerances it held. But in the end it's nothing more than a simple fan blade.

BTW, I had some similar impressions about the close-up look I once got of a
large rocket engine nozzle. Then I realized that it was really nothing more
than a big coiled cooling tube surrounded by an external shell - pretty simple
stuff, actually. And the "de Laval" part of that nozzle, which is what makes
it work to begin with, is as simple as can be and is a design which dates back
to over a century ago.

~~~
throwaway5752
I know that it's a big container holding a bunch of fan blades on the same rod
that push air around at different speeds.

But from what I found, the Trent 1000 (Rolls Royce engine for Boeing
Dreamliner/787) cost $8B to develop and has 30,000 components in it. I just
don't agree with you that the elegance of it's mechanism of action means that
it's not insanely complicated in its implementation.

~~~
southern_cross
And that component count no doubt includes very basic things like rivets and
nuts and bolts and wires and connectors and so on. Maybe even the individual
balls in the ball bearings, if they still even use such things. Probably also
the individual electrical components in the control circuits and such. And how
many individual fan blades are in them these days - hundreds, thousands maybe?

Note the attached link; strip away all of the external pipes and wires and
such (all part of the component count, no doubt), and what you're left with is
mechanically relatively simple. A challenge to build and maintain, maybe, with
tons of fan blades, but still pretty simple.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-
Royce_Trent_1000#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-
Royce_Trent_1000#/media/File:Goodwin_Hall_Entry_Rolls_Royce_T1000.jpg)

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jackweirdy
Virgin Atlantic were/are still so disrupted that they ended up buying 4
A330-200 aircraft to fill the void in fleet schedules this summer as all of
their B787 use affected engines. (For reference they have a fleet of <40
aircraft in the first place)

It’s such a difference in scale that engineering oversights in the design of
engine blades leads down a road that brings you to buying whole planes to get
around the problem

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staunch
> _safety agencies now limit Dreamliners powered by one of the Trent 1000
> engine models under scrutiny to flying no more than 2.3 hours from the
> nearest airport — down from 5.5 hours previously._

This seems like what these agencies should be doing anyway. Why allow a plane
to be 5.5 hours from an emergency landing at all? That's just an insane amount
of time if there's a major problem. I absolutely hate it when I'm flying over
the middle of pacific. It has always seemed insane to me.

I don't see how an engineer would ever recommend being even 2.3 hours away if
it's possible to fly a safer route. There should be regulations requiring
airlines to fly the safest reasonable route. If it adds even 25% to the
flight, so be it. An abundance of caution seems logical.

~~~
vladimirralev
You have to know these guys have earned their right to stay 5.5h out of range
with a safety record. A longer flight also means more expensive. There is a
calculation showing once you increase the price too much people start taking
other less-safe transportation which results in more deaths and more GDP lost
in terms of business. While this doesn't directly correlate here with pacific
flights, I am sure they've done the same calculation for this case too.

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scottmcdot
This is 'disruption' in the operational sense?

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rosser
The airlines are having to pull massively CapEx equipment (the price tag on a
787-9 is well over a quarter billion dollars) out of their fleets to have the
IPC turbine blades on their engines replaced — using a temporary fix, which
will require them to be pulled from service yet again, once the permanent fix
is vetted.

Of course they mean "disruption" in the operational sense.

I see no basis on which to infer the Silly Valley sense of the term here.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Silly Valley

I hope that typo was intentional, because it’s accurate.

~~~
rosser
It is. I don't remember where I picked it up, but I've been using it for
years.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Love it, thanks for sharing.

~~~
southern_cross
Sillycon Valley is how I have long referred to it.

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sunstone
Interesting article but wow what a power pig that page is.

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cup-of-tea
This stupid thing American journalists do with avoiding the word "and" in
headlines really makes them difficult to read sometimes.

~~~
userbinator
Certainly, I read the headline in a completely different meaning --- Boeing's
engines are having trouble, and airlines are switching to Airbus instead.

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hotdog97
Here's a light-hearted comparison between the airline and PC world:

Motherboard/integration - Boeing/Airbus - a bunch of Taiwanese conglomerates,
but the core design comes from Intel

OS - Boeing/Airbus - Microsoft/Apple

CPU/Engine - Rolls-Royce/GE - Intel

RAM/fuel - Saudi Aramco/etc - Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron

..

I don't know if it's useful in any way, but I found it interesting to do this
exercise.

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wensley
Can't read with an ad-blocker enabled.

~~~
mirimir
Friendlier article: [https://www.fliegerfaust.com/airbus-boeing-engines-
problems-...](https://www.fliegerfaust.com/airbus-boeing-engines-
problems-2578418376.html)

~~~
mirimir
... but truncated, and missing the part about the Philadelphia accident.

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theNJR
Was this article written by a bot? WTF sentences.

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IncRnd
Indeed. It's difficult to read this article.

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akhilcacharya
It's interesting how the term "disrupt" has been overloaded these days because
the headline gave me a different impression than the article.

~~~
berkut
Thousands of passengers' flights / holidays have been affected:

[https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&...](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12038034)

And that's just one airline - how is that not disruption?

~~~
freeone3000
Because it doesn't "revolutionize" an industry by introducing venture capital-
funded competitors with a new type of smartphone app.

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StanislavPetrov
Clearly its not that advanced if it doesn't work properly. Perhaps they
shouldn't try to rush out prototypes that are incomplete before the kinks are
worked out.

~~~
na85
Rushing out prototypes without working out the kinks sounds like the behaviour
of every javascript project ever.

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mirimir
So is this the problem that led to the recent engine failure, and passenger
death?

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/southwest-...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/southwest-
airlines-jennifer-riordan-pasenger-window-sucked-engine-explosion-passenger-
philadelphia-a8309891.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860902)

~~~
dingo_bat
They talk about this in TFA. That was a really old engine.

