CFM International CEO Gael Meheust joins the podcast to dive into the remarkable story behind the CFM56: Hear how teams on opposite sides of the Atlantic persevered against the odds to propel the industry into a new age.
Visit CFM International's website to see a timeline of the company's extraordinary history
Check 6 Revisits delves into Aviation Week's more than 100-year archive. Subscribers can explore our archive here and read key Aviation Week articles relating to this podcast here:
- GE Will Supply France With F101 Engine Core Technology (June 11, 1973)
- CFM-56 Aimed at Current Transports (July 22, 1974)
- United Picks CFM56 for DC-8-60s (April 9, 1979)
- USAir Negotiating 737-300 Purchase (March 9, 1981)
- Improved CFM56 Will Power A320 (November 12, 1984)
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Transcript
Christine Boynton:
Welcome to Check 6 Revisits, where we comb through more than a century of Aviation Week and Space Technology Archives. On this podcast, our editors explore pivotal industry moments and achievements of the past while considering how they might relate to the events of today. I'm your host, Christine Boynton, Aviation Week senior editor for Air Transport. And today we have a special anniversary episode marking five decades of a partnership between Safran and GE. This joint venture CFM International is sometimes called the biggest engine maker you've never heard of, which is all the more remarkable as it has long since established itself as the most successful engine maker in the history of commercial aviation.
Today, CFM has delivered 42,500 engines to more than 650 operators. Now, as CFM marks its 50th anniversary, we take a look at the story of how it came to be and speak a little bit about how more than once it teetered on the edge of failure only to survive and prosper into the company. We know today. A shared vision of its two founding fathers, GE's Gerhard Neumann, and Rene Ravaud of Snecma, now Safran, persevered against the odds to establish a 50-50 partnership that is not only pushing forward with new sustainable propulsion concepts for the 21st century, but which has held up as setting the gold standard for international cooperative ventures. So to help us dissect all of this, we have with a Gael Meheust, the president and CEO of CFM, and Guy Norris, Aviation Week's propulsion editor. But first to kick us off, a little snippet from the past.
Jack Hope (archive recording):
Hell, I'm there in a White House. So as they sat down, I don't think the introduction was hardly over until Neumann said... By the way, as a background of this, GE had, at the Air Force's permission, most of the detail hardware was declassified so they could get it made, but the engine was classified as far as they were concerned. Well, Neumann starts out to me, "Well, the first thing I want people in the White House to understand is that the F-101 is unclassified." And this is probably the most dramatic meeting I've probably been in my life. Pete Flanagan stood up and he says, "You say it's unclassified and my Deputy Secretary of Defense, John Foster, sat here says, 'It is classified.' Who do you think I'm going to believe?" And he walks out. That ended that meeting.
Christine Boynton:
Guy, can you give us a little context here? This was maybe the first stumbling block, wasn't it, for CFM, and how do we get into this crazy situation, an engine being discussed in the White House with such passion?
Guy Norris:
I know. Yeah. Thanks, Christine. Well, what a remarkable story, as you said in the introduction, and I think it's important to put it in a little bit of context because what GE and Snecma at that time were talking about was nothing short of a revolution really. It was bringing to the market a small version of a big engine, which had never been done before. And to get that design working and to make it efficient and to really achieve all the targets they needed to, they had to have this military corps. I think before we look at really why that situation arose, we really should look at where GE was particularly at that time in the late '60s, particularly when this relationship began. And GE was getting into the big fan business really, although it had invented the big fan with the TF39 engine for the US Air Force's Galaxy Program, the C-5, it had been difficult to commercialize this success because it had missed out on being on the 747.
And so it was desperate to seek out new business. And of course, the birth in Europe of the Airbus A300 gave them a chance to get an early foot in on the door on that, and they needed European partners for that. And to cut a long story short in that area, that led to relationship with MTU of Germany and MTU was looking for additional capacity. And that ultimately brought in Snecma because Snecma was this driving ambitious company that really wanted to build up its commercial business. So the whole CF6 business really took off, not specifically because of the A300 ironically, but at the Paris Air Show in June 1969 when KLM, SAS, Swiss Air, and the French airline, UTA, ordered the CF6 turning over the Pratt & Whitney competition to engine the DC-10, which they were all ordering, that meant a huge breakthrough in Europe because they were all European airlines.
And it meant that suddenly politically, there was a stake over there. And it meant that there was a European power base literally. And that meant that both the A300 and DC-10 engines were supported by this political and customer base on that side of the Atlantic. But beyond this, they were looking at what comes next. And just as we are going to dig into here, the one thing that they could think of was, well, there's this 10-ton sector, this area of 20,000 pound thrust where we could bring this big engine technology and shrink it down. So maybe Gael has some thoughts on that.
Christine Boynton:
Yeah. Gael, thank you so much for joining us today. Congratulations on the 50th anniversary. And I wonder if we can bring it back maybe even a little bit further, and you can tell us a bit about what was Snecma as it was then, and what was its reasoning behind wanting to get into this 10-ton engine plan. Why was it such a big deal?
Gael Meheust:
Well, thank you, Christine and Guy. I mean, first of all, it's my great pleasure to be here with you today talking about CFM. It's probably the thing I like to do the best in my life talking about CFM, I can do that all day. And now you're bringing me towards the birth of CFM, the initial steps. So it's even more exciting. Yes, today, this year is our 50th anniversary. And Guy, it was interesting to hear you talking about how GE was positioned at the time of history because at the same time, Safran, who was Snecma at the time, was in a similar mindset.
CFM was formed in 1974, but very few know that the whole process started earlier than that obviously. Sometime I tease my audience asking to guess the year where it's all started and to bring a little bit of romance in the talk. I said this is the year where the movie Love Story was released in Paris. It's the spring of 1971. So I don't know if Rene Ravaud and the Snecma team had seen that movie that must have created this urge for partnership. But that's the fun fact. The whole story started in 1971, and if you project yourself back that your Snecma at the time was state-owned, 100% state-owned, and only involved in military engines. A little bit of subcontracting on the CF6, as you mentioned, Guy, on this engine for the Airbus airplane, but very, very little participation. I mean, Snecma was doing great engines, passionate of aviation, know about the Mirage and the Atar engines of the early Mirage III.
And in 1970, Snecma was starting the development of the M53, which was the engine of the Mirage 2000. So a great technology, but Rene Ravaud, who was this visionary leader that Snecma had at the time, realized that the future of the company had to go through commercial engines. So there was this real understanding that Snecma had to deploy a strategy to go into the commercial engine. It was backed by the French government. Interestingly, there was a president at the time in France called Georges Pompidou. He was the president only for five years. He had the easy task of succeeding to General de Gaulle, right? This iconic figure of French history. But he did it so nicely because he did everything different as General de Gaulle.
He was a different man. He had more empathy with people. He was a visionary. And he told the Safran leaders, "If you guys are willing to step into the commercial engine business, if you want to capitalize on the great technologies that you have acquired on the military business, the government will be there to support." So that was extremely important, and it ended up to be a key element also for GE later on. So Ravaud, just like Neumann in the States, had seen this void in the strategy for the 10-ton class engine. It was a big engine that was very successful there, it was JT8D, but there was a potential for a new application. But Ravaud was a smart guy, obviously. He knew he could do it alone. He had to find a partner. The question was which partner?
Christine Boynton:
And the French really kind of took the bull by the horns here, right? They came to Boston for an initial meeting with GE. And the meeting happened at a place I'm familiar with at the Prudential Center in Boston. And it was a restaurant called Top of the Hub, unfortunately Top of the Hub's no longer around, I think it closed in 2020. But Guy, you spoke to veterans who were actually at this meeting. What did they tell you about that initial gathering before this joint venture became a reality?
Guy Norris:
Yeah, that's such a great story. I think you remember that GE was really its archrival was, and continues to really be, Pratt & Whitney, I suppose, at that time. And here they get a call almost out of the blue saying that this French company is interested in meeting. And they know that Snecma at the time was big partners with Pratt, as Gael mentioned, the JT8. They were building parts for that and that sort of thing. So they must have been really puzzled. So I talked to Ed Wall, who was the vice president of engines for GE, who was at that meeting. He was there with Gerhard Neumann and Jim Sack, who was the GE lawyer. And they must have been so curious about what this is all about. And Edouard Lamy, Jean Crépin, Jean Garnier all came over this team. They met initially at The Ritz-Carlton before going to your restaurant, Christine, at the top of the Prue it might have been in those days.
Christine Boynton:
Top of the Hub. Top of the Prue. Yep.
Guy Norris:
Okay. And they were saying when the three French guys sat opposite them, they got this drawing out and rolled out this proposal, and it was more or less exactly what they had been looking at themselves for a 10-ton engine. And I remember Ed Walls saying, "You could have bowled us over with a feather when they looked at the sketch of this engine that the Snecma guys called the M56." And as Gael just mentioned, the M was the motor, the code name really for their project numbers. And it happened to be 56 was the particular one they were looking at.
So then they had this amazing period where, yeah, let's get together. They got Neumann asked, "Well, do you think we should do this afterwards?" And he said, "Well, why not? French government money is backing this project. When do we have a chance to get that leverage?" So the two architectures began to converge. The French M-56 and the American came up, the GE side was the GE-13, which was this basically a new concept based on the core of the F-101, the military engine that had been developed for the B-1 bomber at the time. And that's going to be the one that causes all the trouble later on.
Christine Boynton:
Yeah. So I mean, at this point, I think the French realized the B-1 core is a part of this project. So Gael, you already spoke about President Pompidou being a visionary. What did the French government do at this point to kind of get over this hump, this block? Because it really became an item on presidential agendas.
Guy Norris:
Yeah. And sorry, Gael, I beg your pardon to dive in. The reason it became a problem is that when GE applied for its export license, because obviously that would be the US government said, "No, absolutely not. It's a classified engine. It's military, it's our top secret stuff. There's no way we can let this go into outside of the country as a commercial engine." So sorry to interrupt.
Gael Meheust:
No, no, no. And Christine, before going into really the question you asked about the French government, one thing about Pompidou that was a fun fact because I don't know if you remember, but at the time, UK was not part of the EU in '71, and there were discussions to include the UK, which ended up being in the EU '73. Well, we know now they're out of the EU again. So there was some kind of a pressure from Pompidou and his cabinet to push Ravaud towards Rolls-Royce, the British. And the fun fact is that Ravaud said, "No, over my dead body, Mr. President." There were two reasons for that. One very emotional and one more rational. The very emotional is that Ravaud used to be enlisted in the French Resistance when he was a very young man in 1944. And he was part of the troops along with the Allied forces that encircled the city of Brest in the west part of France to have the Nazi surrender.
And they were Ravaud and his teammates were sure that this would happen, but the Allied didn't have time. They needed all the men they could to march towards Berlin. So one night, the Allied decided to go and carpet bomb a city of Brest to save time. And believe it or not, in that process, Ravaud lost an arm. Those who knew Ravaud could see that he had this small arm with a glove like a black leather glove. He lost his right arm because of simply a British bomb. So he had a personal animosity against anything that would come across the Channel. So that's for the fun fact. The more rational strategic decision is '71 is the time of the Concorde. Concorde, which was a fantastic development between UK and France, British Aerospace and Aerospatiale. Technically, this airplane was incredible, but commercially it was obvious it was going to be a failure because the US were not on board.
And Ravaud learned from that experience thinking we need a US partner. We cannot afford to make an engine among Europeans because the market is over there. 80% of the single-isle market at the time was US domestic. So that's why it was driven towards the United States. Believe it or not, he started with Pratt when he started to talk. Before the phone call that you mentioned, Guy, there was a short attempt with Pratt because as you said, there were some relationships, but I guess Pratt was in a difficult situation because they had their very successful engine, the JT8D. So it was like, "Why would I have jeopardize anything I have that's so successful right now to initiate a competition to that?" So that's by elimination process. I would say that Ravaud realized that the good partner was GE, and in fact it was GE and they made that phone call you talked about, and they met together, and I'm sure we'll go into that later.
The personality of the two men, everything was working. So to answer your question, Christine, yes, there was this roadblock. GE got a preliminary license to start discussing with Snecma export license, but it was a temporary one, and I think it was the end of '72 that GE had to reapply to apply for an extension. And that's where the State Department said no. The first time it was easy to say yes because nobody had the clue that this could be a viable project. But after a year discussion, it became more serious. So I guess the officials in DC thought that there was a potential danger. This was the Cold War. If we give access to technical information of a military strategic bomber, who knows? Maybe those drawings will end up in Moscow. So there was a very legitimate concern. And so this is where Pompidou stepped in.
Ravaud went to him and said, "We have a roadblock here." And he said, "Okay, well, I happened to meet President Nixon in May of 1973 in Reykjavik in the US-France Summit. Let's put that subject at the agenda." And with the help of GE and the GE team in DC, it was the US side of the political side accepted to put this discussion on the agenda. And it was discussed in Reykjavik in '73 and Nixon, there was a Cold War, but he also needed ally. Everybody knew that to be successful, you need ally. France was one of the key player with the strategic nuclear force. And so it's hard to say no to a partner like that, like Georges Pompidou. So Nixon said, "You know what? We'll give it a try. I think it's worth it for the benefit of the two countries." And that's how it ended up. So yes, Pompidou helped by putting this subject at the agenda and make sure that he could get the approval from Nixon.
Christine Boynton:
Well, and there was no precedent for what GE and Snecma were proposing. I mean, this was so innovative and there was some frustration from Nixon behind the scenes. When this was on the agenda at the summit, Jack Hope later recalled that Nixon was irritated with Pompidou pushing the issue. And he said something along the lines of, "I'm interested in promoting world peace and he wants to talk about an airplane motor." And that's a cleaned up version of what he said. But Hope would also later get just another interesting note, a note indirectly from Nixon, and it was scribbled on yellow legal sized paper that said, "What the hell does Snecma stand for?" So just all of these interesting anecdotes behind the scenes.
But Guy, I wonder if you can tell us about Jack Hope visiting the CIA, because I think the way it was described was he showed up with a box of engine parts, and this was part of his way of providing an education a little bit about what the heck they were talking about when it came to this engine. And then maybe you can touch a little bit on Gus Weiss's compromise, because Weiss was, of course, he was an economist with the US government, but he actually had quite a significant role to play at this stage of the CFM56 development.
Guy Norris:
Yeah, that's right. Well, as Gael mentioned, obviously it was raised to this highest political levels in an attempt to get over this roadblock. But in the meantime, obviously there was machinations inside the governments about how to get it over the finish line. And there was a couple of characters, as you mentioned, Christine, Gus Weiss, who was this economist. He was basically stood up against the chief antagonist on the US side who was Cliff Simpson, the chief of the US Air Force Power Plant Division at Wright Field. And he'd been going back to World War II. He was a veteran of Operation Paperclip, which had been the sort of Allied attempt to try and grab as many of the Nazi scientists as possible as the Allied forces moved into Germany. So he was still in that mindset of this has got to be a protected technology. And he told everybody he had red, white and blue on his chest if he ripped his shirt open.
That's the sort of patriotic person he was. So you have this Gus Weiss, the economist, who's desperate to find a compromise versus Cliff Simpson. In the meantime, as you quite rightly say, Jack Hope is working the problem from within the government as well. And he's thinking, well, I'm an engineer. I know this situation. What are we talking about here? We're talking about a lot of components. That's the nuts and bolts of what the core is. So why don't I just take this round in a box and show people they don't know what an HP turbine is, or sort of a nozzle and a guide vane. They don't know about any of this, so I'll just show them. So he went to Langley to the CIA headquarters with his box. I think he went to the State Department team and went to the White House and he said it was great.
Everybody loved to come round. They'd never seen anything like this. And the purpose of this was just to basically say, "Look, there's not one single part of this which is classified. Everybody knows about these alloys, everybody knows about this shape. So what are we dealing with here?" And of course, what he was really trying to say is it's not the technology of the components, it's the way it's put together. That's the magic source. So between the two of them, Jack Hope and Gus Weiss, they gradually began to build up this sort of way of coming a compromise essentially.
And so when Gus Weiss flew to Paris to talk to Ravaud about this, he met him in a restaurant, unrolled his sort of grand plan. He said, "How about this?" He said, "Instead of putting this engine together and leading the development through the Snecma side of it, how about we just bring it across the Atlantic and we can keep the core as a sort of a tight unit and all of the Snecma elements can be brought over and wrapped around it? And there's no need for anybody to have to worry about what people see. We can contain this."
In very simplistic terms, that was the beginning of this compromise, which allowed the thing to move forward. And to get to the point that Gael was talking about where in May '73, the State Department finally recommended yes, they think it could be released. And of course it was sanctioned this meeting in June of '73, during a one-hour meeting in Reykjavik at the Kjarvalsstadir Museum, an exhibition center in Reykjavik.
I think just before I again pass it back to you, it's really amazing because just a few months later, there's Nixon flying back to DC. He's in the middle of the Watergate scandal by then. He probably was thinking, oh, here, one of these little things on the agenda. One of the big things that was going to happen was of course the Arab invasion or the Arab oil embargo. And of course that erupted, it changed the world, and it happened at the end of that year. And that very fact, I think really combined with the fact that the whole program that CFM program had meant to do was delayed by a couple of years anyway, because of the core issue together with the oil embargo meant that all of a sudden everybody wanted something that was 20% more efficient, and they'd already started to worry about environmental aspects and noise. So from nowhere really, you've got a situation where suddenly an engine like the CFM56, as it was then called, was like what everybody wanted. So time played into their hands beautifully.
Christine Boynton:
And you had mentioned Jack Hope, I just wanted to share a little anecdote there about Jack that I thought was very interesting. It was one of these cultural tidbits that come up when you're talking about this partnership. So he had been with the Nixon administration, but when he was asked by Neumann to serve as a general manager for the program, at the time, he was working on a farm in rural Ohio, and he later heard from a Snecma individual that they were initially wary of him. And that wasn't because of his political background, but "because French farmers were known as excellent negotiators and I was a farmer." So I just love that. And despite cultural differences, or perhaps in some ways because of them, the relationship really thrived. And Guy, I think you mentioned this a little bit, each side of the team kind of wind and dined each other at the beginning, right?
Lots of fine French dining from Snecma. And not to be outdone, at one point, Neumann arranged for a private lunch at a KFC, which is a fast food fried chicken place in the US where Colonel Sanders look alike drove up in a Model T Ford, another time they rolled a red carpet across the street from Neumann's office at GE in Lynn got a one-day liquor license and provided menu all in French. So not to be outdone on this side of the pond, but there were challenges in communication, right? And even when speaking the same language, it didn't always directly translate. So I think one of my favorite anecdotes is again from Jack Hope, when he recalled during a meeting, Snecma had referred to an item as essential, and Jack objected. He said, "This is significant but not essential." So then a debate actually ensued, and then it was finally clarified when Hope is talking about essential, he meant 100% and significant 85%.
Jean-Claude Malroux, who I believe general manager at Snecma, argued that essential meant 85% and significant meant 45%. So that was clarified. We could continue the discussions, but also physical challenges, of course. And when the fax was invented, that helped quite a bit. There was also a dedicated telephone line set up between the two engineering departments with a list. People would line up outside of this telephone booth to talk to who they needed to speak with. But even with these significant challenges, the point I'm trying to make here is the spirit of this thing was collaborative through and through. We have another snippet here to share from some archive audio from Jim Krebs, a GE veteran and one of the visionaries behind the CFM56. And in it he talks exactly about that, about the spirit of this collaboration.
Jim Krebs (archive recording):
When the decision was made by going into the GE system has designed this particular architecture, this particular cycle, this core, I think people bought it. Egos were not standing in the way of this. Once they understood what we had and understood that this had been decided on, and we were going to go forward together 50-50, and they wanted 50-50, very important, everybody came together.
Christine Boynton:
So Gael, when we're thinking about the early stages of this joint venture, can you describe some of these early days of bringing this collaboration into a reality as they're working towards this engine program? How did this work?
Gael Meheust:
Yeah, Christine, the initial fact that made it everything work, in my opinion, was the friendship that was created between Ravaud and Neumann. When they met the first time, they realized that they had so much in common. They were both World War II veterans. They had the vision of these 10-ton engines. There was a mutual respect from day one. So I think we should not underestimate the importance of that. Everything is business after that. But they both knew also that to win a war, for instance, like they were veterans, you need to have allied. And so with this in mind, they started this partnership and you mentioned about the facts, anything. I mean the fact that these two companies, these two men thought that a partnership would create value between two companies so far apart. One was a government-owned company. One was listed in the stock market, two different cultures, two different currencies, two different languages separated by a notion, no cell phone, no Zoom or Teams.
They didn't have the facts. As you said, the telex was the one thing they had at the time for those who can remember what horrible this was, and they didn't have even the digital mock-up. Think about it. You are trying to have two people making modules that are supposed to fit to one another, but you don't have those DMUs that we have today. How do you do that? I mean, the odds that this would work, anybody with a bit of judgment should have thought this was impossible. They made it work. They made it absolutely work. And they started this development with the belief that there was a market, there would be a market they launched. They did something would rarely do today, they launched the engine, the full development of the engine, with no aircraft program. In today's world, I'm not saying engine guys don't do demonstrators, because we do.
But in today's world, the way it works is an airframer thinks about an airplane that needs an engine, specifies an engine, send a specification to the engine guys, can you make me an engine? Their way of thinking was, we're going to make an engine. It's going to be so great that airframers will need that engine to put under the wing of new airframe. You'll see. So it was hectic. There was at Villa Roche, there was this enclosed fenced area with a lock where GE would store the drawings that they would bring under the arm in those boxes, around boxes. That's how they were working.
It was rolling down drawings on the table, and there was a team of GE people in France. When an engineer would come and say, "That flange that matches with the core, this is how I want to design it. What do you think?" "Well, you need to tweak it here and there because our part will be different." So it was incredible the fact that they thought this could work in this environment, and they had no doubt, they never doubted even when, and maybe we'll talk about it, even when it took so much time to receive the first order when everybody was losing hope, those two guys, Ravaud and Neumann, never lost faith, never.
Christine Boynton:
It's amazing. And Guy, maybe you want to jump in here to talk a little bit about that relationship and then eventually how did it get that final stamp of US government approval with this bomber core?
Guy Norris:
Well, yeah, I mean, as Gael said, it was remarkable, first of all, that the engine came together so beautifully that there was telegrams and telexes between Ravel and Neumann, and Ravaud was asking how it was going, and Neumann said it just fit perfectly. There was no problem. The first engine ran on June 20th, 1974 at Evendale, started up first time. And by then, of course, gradually, painfully, they'd managed to get US government final approval. So the whole thing was ready to go, basically. The formal legal agreement, well, incorporated in France as a company on September 17th, 1974, at which point CFM was capitalized to the huge sum of 76,000 US dollars or 61,000 euros in this day and age. And then of course, the legal agreement was signed on the 24th of September 1974, which is recognized as the 50th anniversary. So yeah, as Gael mentioned, it was really Ravaud and Neumann's personal determination, their friendship, which was at the core of how it managed to survive these difficult years and the build it and they will come attitude was very much the way that they saw it, that this is the best engine.
Everybody will come beating a path to our door. But they didn't. That was the problem. Unfortunately, it was a difficult time in the market. They did have one potentially on, which was an American project, a US Air Force program called the Advanced Medium STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) project was a replacement for the C-130, which of course, well, here we are 50 years later, and C-130 is celebrating its 70th anniversary, I think. So obviously you can see where that went, but it did give the chance, the very first chance for a CFM engine to fly. They bolted one McDonnell Douglas and Boeing were competing in February '77. One of these engines for the first time left the ground at Long Beach on the bolted to the wing of the YC-15, which was the McDonnell Douglas contender for the AMST, which was also known as America's Most Studied Transport.
That was another version of the acronym. And of course then just a few weeks later, Snecma's Caravelle flying testbench performed the first real flight of the engine at Merignac in France, which was really the first time the engine itself had been fully evaluated. So just in terms of the market, a couple of major things that really I think we should talk about is in August '75, and Gael may know more about this than I do, but Jean de Vries, who was in Snecma at the time, came up with this idea of he looked at... They'd come up with this idea of a fuel efficient quiet engine that was perfect to replace really those second first generation jets. But the CFM56 originally designed was slightly too big for any of these projects.
So he said, "Why do we do a crop fund?" He called it CFM56 Junior. So we'll hear more about that, won't we? But that was a key moment. In the meantime, of course, the CFM were desperately trying to find a way to get it onto something into Boeing, and they went to... Boeing was pretty interested because Joe Sutter, for example, I spoke to him about this, and Joe Sutter, for those that don't know is the sort of legend at Boeing. He was the chief, the father of the 747, and he shared the patent on the 737, for example.
And he told me, he said, "Pratt thought they owned the world." Pratt & Whitney that is. And of course they did. They dominated at that time. And Boeing at the time was led by T Wilson. He knew that Pratt had them over a barrel a little bit. So he was pretty keen to talk to somebody who's going to give them an option. And so the CFM team flew to Seattle in February of 1977. And Christine, I think you know a little story about this. Basically, Ravaud sat across the table from T Wilson and said, "Look, we'll agree to do a 707 retrofit. We will put the engine on the 7 0 7, give it new life." And T Wilson thought, okay, if I put $25 million in and you put 25 million, let's give it a go. It's a deal. Then they went to a restaurant to talk about it.
Christine Boynton:
Yeah. And the meeting ended, "I'll put my 25 million, you'll put your 25 million." And then T Wilson, in typical blunt fashion, turned to Ravaud. And this goes back to a story you told Gael at the beginning. He asked Ravaud, "How do you tie your tie with one arm?" And he had a Windsor knot. Ravaud had a Windsor knot. He untied the tie at dinner and tied it right back up with one arm. So that was the start of a very long and fruitful friendship.
Guy Norris:
So yeah, it was all about establishing trust. And of course, the big breakthrough commercially was not far away, even though the 707 was a great test platform, it proved that it was a viable combination. It established trust with Boeing. And as that was happening in the meantime, there was a meeting at what they call a conquistadors meeting where these executives from all over the industry meet in a very casual setting. It was at the A Bar Dude Ranch in Wyoming, and it was a ranch on by Charles Gates, who was The Gates Rubber Company, the Learjet, he's a sort of big wheeler dealer in the aerospace business. And guests there at that time, Jackson McGowan, who was the former president of Douglas Aircraft, and they were playing golf. Brian Rowe, of course, president of GE, Jack Parker, Neil Burgess.
And they all sort of said, "Do you know what? A really good airplane to re-engine might be the DC8. It's got bags of life in it, structure, but it's so noisy. Its fuel burn is not great, that there's got to be something we can do." So that was the big of the germ really of a thing which would save the program. Meanwhile, of course, the time was ticking along. There was now so many years since they'd launched the program and yet not a single contract other than that one engine that flew on the YC-15, which was CFM's first contract. There was not a single application. So things were getting scary. Ravaud talking to Jacques Rossignol had said, "I can hear the vultures flying around the building. It was getting that desperate."
Gael Meheust:
Yeah, if I may interject with a little story there, someone helped me find an article from a French newspaper called Le Canard Enchaîné. We think it's end of '78 or early '79, and the title is The Misfortune of an Unsellable Engine. I mean, it's a national paper. Everybody reads that. And the whole paper was about how this management of Snecma is dilapidating the money from the taxpayer and 2 billion French francs with no hope, because the deal was the government would support and would be refunded. It was a loan in case the program was successful. But if it's not successful, then the government takes the tab. So it's all explaining why all these attempts to re-engine an airplane had failed. And it says, "Because the management ignores a golden rule. They think they can sell an engine that has no airplane application instead of waiting for an airframer." It's the whole story that I mentioned before.
It was a golden rule that they ignored and they go and go and go. To your point, the pressure on Ravaud was so high that Pompidou unfortunately was not there anymore. He passed in 1974. Giscard d'Estaing was the new president. The economy was not so well in France because of the oil prices that went to the roof and all of that. And the presidential election of 1981 were looming. Giscard didn't want this kind of noise in the media, and so they order to terminate the program. Literally, they gave him an order, "You need to terminate."
And Ravaud heard it, but played dumb for a while and tried to ignore the pressure and give a chance to the teams because in his core, he knew that this program had the future. And it's really, there was this meeting in April of '79 with one agenda between GE and Safran. It was a board meeting of CFM. One agenda item was to shelve the joint venture, really. And the first order that I'm sure you're going to talk about, Guy, about this DC-8 re-engineering program when it came to fruition came literally two weeks before the date of that board meeting. So that's how close the whole thing was about to die before being the incredible success that we know today.
Christine Boynton:
Guy, do you want to jump into how did the DC-8 happen? How did that opportunity come to be? There's so many cliffhangers in this story along the way.
Guy Norris:
Yeah, I'm so glad you said that, Gael, because that really put in perspective about how close to the edge it got. It's astonishing. But luckily as you say that, that basic launch decision in March '79, they finally got this order to re-engine basically a handful of DC-8s mean, I think they ended up doing, I can't remember the number, but 180.
Gael Meheust:
110, I think.
Guy Norris:
110, right. That's right. But even that, and then Christine and I were talking about this earlier on, even that was down to the Y too, because Pratt came up with this like a hush kit version of the engine, and it was very attractive. It was half the price of the CFM56. But when you looked at the operational restrictions that the aircraft would have with the Pratt engine versus the CFM, in particularly as the noise aspect came into so many of the decisions, it was clear that the new engine had the edge quite clearly in terms of noise. But the deciding factor was a gentleman called Neil Armstrong, who happened to be Apollo 11 astronaut, first man on the moon, who was a consultant for one of the airlines, United, that was looking at doing this. And basically the final decision was based on his recommendation, he said, "You really have to go for this new engine because it's the one that's going to give you most life and operational flexibility." And so amazing, isn't it?
Gael Meheust:
Yeah, yeah. No, the chairman of United told Neil, "You are an engineer. You are respected engineer. I mean, my board wants me to sign with this CFM, whatever. Can you tell me what this engine is about? I mean, give me a go, no go." And by the way, you live in Cincinnati right next to Cincinnati, Lebanon, Ohio. And I think Neil at the time was a professor in the University of Cincinnati. So these are your buddies down next door. And Neil came in Evendale, spent time there, typical Neil Armstrong, take his time, reviewed the drawings with the engineers, asked questions, meaningful questions, as you can imagine. And peacefully came back to the president of United and said, "I recommend the CFM56, a great engine. If you go for it, you won't be disappointed." But yeah, like you, Guy, I really love that first man who's the hero of anybody who loves aerospace play the part in launching the CFM. I think it's a fantastic story.
Guy Norris:
It really is. It's so amazing. And then of course, that's when the ball began to roll, if you like. 1980, the following year, a major event when the Air Force decided to begin looking at re-engining the KC-135 with the engine. And in July 81, of course, gave the big order, which really gave it the go ahead. So all of a sudden there's the CFM 11 years on from its sort of birth really, or from the concept, not being launched on the new twins, but bizarrely on two first or second generation quad jets. Who'd have thought? But then of course we get into, finally, that's going back to that CFM56, the junior and the beginning of really what it was, the golden era when you began to see new applications on not only a new 737, the Boeing twin, but Airbus course comes in with the A320.
Gael Meheust:
This is where you see the vision of Ravaud and Neumann. You mentioned that story when they went to Seattle, put $25 million on the table to re-engine the 707. It was a huge amount of money at the time, of course, and with no identified hope of doing anything with it. And then like two, three years later, the 707 military application, because the KC-135 was a 707 is re-engine. And all the work that was done with the 707 initial re-engining came to fruition. They didn't have to prove anything. This was already there talking about visionary people who knew that sometime you have to bite the bullet, put money on the table, eventually it's going to get back. I think all that, I mean, I have the utmost respect for these two men. What they did was incredible, this vision.
Guy Norris:
And it really was build it, and they will come. And it did finally, it just took much longer than anybody thought.
Gael Meheust:
Yeah. And the Air Force was the biggest customer, has been the biggest customer of CFM for years and years because I think we re-engined 544 airplanes, four engines per airplane.
Guy Norris:
And still going strong.
Christine Boynton:
Wow. And I mean, how strange was it that the first applications were quad jets and not the twin jets that CFM originally envisioned, right?
Guy Norris:
Yeah, exactly.
Gael Meheust:
Yeah, I think they were ready to take whatever was working at the time.
Guy Norris:
Yeah.
Christine Boynton:
So I mean from here, the rest is kind of history, right? A cascade of new programs and orders, a pivotal decision to look at the CFM56 Junior, Guy, you mentioned that earlier, which of course became the engine of choice for the re-engining. Gael, at this point, it was on its way to becoming the most popular commercial engine. Can you reflect on how it came through all these obstacles? I know you've talked about the partnership between the two founding fathers, but how it came through all these obstacles to reach this point in history.
Gael Meheust:
I think it's the key factor for success of CFM really I mean lays in two, three critical decisions that they made initially, the 50-50. I know the 50-50 can be counterintuitive because 50-50 means you have to agree all the time on all major decisions. And you could think if one has 51 and the other one 49 at least one decides and the other one just follows. But that's the problem in any joint ventures that we've seen since then where you had minority partners, those partners are usually very frustrated because they have to contribute financially, but they don't really make decisions. So the 50-50 was critical. It forces decisions. Someone asked me not too long ago, reflecting on the 50 years, "What make you so strong?" And I answer, it came like this, it's all disagreements. We disagree all the time between GE and Safran, but in the right way.
In other words, one thinks about something, the other one has a different vision. It's the combination of those two different visions put together that makes us stronger. And so the 50-50, when it's well done, and with the right management, leadership, effort, with the ability to put yourself in the other one's shoes like GE and Safran have done all over these years, make it successful. The other key factor of success, one other key factor of success in my opinion is we never talk costs at CFM. We share work 50-50 and then we share revenue 50-50. So we notionally split the engine to what represents 50-50 of 50% of the work, and then each one has its own whatever it takes to make it. Because chances that a company like GE and Snecma at the time, government-owned company, had a similar cost structure was close to zero.
So a cost-based approach would have been a disaster. So just do half of the engine, I will give you half of the money and whatever profit you make or not, it's your problem. And that took away off the table very difficult decisions or discussions that we never had to have between the partners because we don't talk about costs. The other thing that also makes it very efficient is we have a very simple organization actually here in Cincinnati, I have a finance office and a contract office. We signed contract with customers and airline and airframers, and we collect the money, 23 billion last year, and we split it between Safran and GE 50-50. And we don't keep anything, I promise.
So very simple organization, because the smart decision was to leave key operational activities to the partners, production engineering, production support, all of that is done by teams that belong to the partners. And we have processes to make things work. We meet several time a year at the management level. Of course, every counterpart between Safran and GE meet all the time. I call them, "You need to consider your counterpart as your twin brother or twin sister." And I foster the fact that they need to speak to one another, if not daily, at least weekly, and understand and put yourself in the other shoes and everything. But we have those quarterly meeting at management level. We take all the key items that have to be discussed and we go through and action items behind, and we have strong processes to make it work. So 50-50, we do not talk about cost and we have a simple organization. I think this is basically the magic rule that makes it work.
Christine Boynton:
And Gael, I have a cheeky question. Does a stubborn spirit still persist at CFM reflecting those early years?
Gael Meheust:
Yeah. Yes, it does, actually. And we never lost that, and I love this. We went through difficult times. We were talking about the launch of the program and how Ravaud and Neumann had to keep the faith, although the vultures were turning over the heads. We had similar situations throughout the years. I'm going to share one with you. When we launched the LEAP, we lost the first four sales campaigns, and it was a little stressful. I was the head of sales on the Safran side. So I tell you, I didn't feel very comfortable. And one day I was called by Jean-Paul Herteman, the CEO of the group at the time. And he asked me explanations. And it was difficult to explain after CFM56 being so successful and you guys keep losing campaigns. And when we lost the Lufthansa campaign, it was a tough moment because Lufthansa was a leader in opinion, I would say. A lot of airlines were looking at the decision Lufthansa would make.
And Lufthansa was very transparent, "You guys don't have the right performance. There is a deficit of performance in your engine. You need to figure this out." And we did in fact had an issue. So one day, John Leahy, who used to be the famous salesperson for Airbus, called me and he said, "Gael, I mean, what's happening? Why are you losing those campaigns? What can we do?" And we decided to put together a workshop with our teams to see if there were anything we could do mostly on the engineering side. And the workshop that was meant to last as long as necessary ended up in two hours because we noticed that there was a specification restriction that was released to our competition that was not to us, it was the length of the engine. So our engineering team said, "Can we use that new dimension that you have specified?"
"Yes. Would that help?" "Of course it would help because if we do that, we can add one stage in the LPT and increase the fan by three inches to 78 inches, which will more than solve our issue. Actually, it's going to put us in front in terms of performance." And so we did that. But again, we never lost faith. Those were tough times. What is happening? How can we do that? And Safran and GE had never been closer than in that difficult time. So yes. And by the end of Le Bourget 2011, we had 60% win rate. Before that, we had zero. And a week after, we had 60%. So we found in that moment the fighting spirit of Ravaud and Neumann. It was back in the teams, and it was one of the most defining moment I ever believed myself within CFM. So there are issues. Nothing is easy, but yes, to your point, the stubborn mindset is still there, intact.
Guy Norris:
And just to jump in there, can you believe that the first LEAP engine ran 11 years? We're recording this September 5, I should say, but 11 years ago yesterday.
Gael Meheust:
Oh, that's true.
Guy Norris:
This is incredible, isn't it?
Gael Meheust:
Absolutely.
Guy Norris:
And what Gael says is, it's interesting. I think we should point out to the listeners that the competition never stands still. And one of the major things that really led to the evolution really, the continuing evolution of the CFM56 and then into the LEAP, was the fact that obviously Pratt & Whitney particularly, and the IAE partnership provided this stiff competition. And it was the LEAP, sorry, the launch of the geared turbofan by Pratt & Whitney, of course, in the 2000s. That really galvanized a response really essentially with the launch of the LEAP. And then Christine, I know you're going to bring us to the finish line here, aren't you? Because we're looking at the future now.
Christine Boynton:
Right. Yeah. So I mean, looking ahead, the JV partnership has already been extended, right? In 2008, pushing that out to 2040. CFM standing on all this achievement, beginning a new generation with the LEAP that we've mentioned in the original plan of the 10 ton engine was to make it fuel efficient and lower the noise. And every generation has done that. Now the RISE is perhaps the ultimate expression of that. And it's funny how 50 years later, it's the same old battle. So Guy, I wonder if you can take it from here.
Guy Norris:
Well, yeah. Thanks, Christine. I think taking the bull by the horns as the expression that you used earlier on, you find that with this is CFM's approach to doing that really to the amazing challenges that are coming up the launch of the RISE, which, and I think Gael will express it in better terms than me in a minute, but it's more of a technology program at the moment still, it's not specifically a focus on an exact product because there's so many options out there, but it's the largest technology investment that CFM's ever been involved with because it's now looking at as we face the challenges of sustainability that are coming up and the idea that we can be carbon-neutral by 2050 is going to take everything that we've got to throw the kitchen sink at this as a challenge.
And that's what CFM's doing in the collective government backed site research development programs on both sides of the Atlantic together with the industrial capability and research that is now available to both GE and Safran. They're throwing everything at this. We're talking about massive increases in bypass ratio, a new small compact core, and the size and efficiency of which has never been really seen before. The addition of hybrid electric elements to it, and then all of it running on sustainable aviation fuel and potentially who knows even hydrogen in the future. So all the bases are being covered. But Gael, over to you because it's a massive challenge, isn't it?
Gael Meheust:
Oh no, you're right. You express it perfectly. This is a technology acquisition maturation program that goes far beyond just one type of architecture. There's material aerodynamics, cooling processes inside the HPT and all of that, and more and more. But yeah, there's one architecture that we have singled out called the open fan. And like Mohamed Ali, our chief engineer at GE express it, you have to visualize an open fan with no casing around the size of a GE90 fan with the core the size of a business jet engine. Basically, that's what is the open fan technical challenge and how it looks. And yes, this engine could bring 20% better fuel burn and therefore CO2 emission that the current generation of engine, which is, I mean, like a LEAP. So it's another huge step. And if you add with that utilization of sustainable aviation fuel or hydrogen eventually at some point, then you are really going to meet the goal of net-zero carbon in 2050.
And so CFM being the leading engine manufacturer, we want to lead this process to take our industry to net-zero carbon by 2050. And truthfully, the spirit of Neumann and Ravaud is still there. When we present this open fan to the world, we feel like we are Ravaud and Neumann. When they were presenting the CFM56 at the time, something people never really saw before, is it going to work? And there's no airplane application for that yet. So we like to see that 50 years later, the spirit of Ravaud and Neumann is still in us, in the team, in the management team intact, totally intact, and we are going after the market with the same optimism, ambition, and insurance that we'll find the right solution. So it's very rewarding. It's a really fantastic journey.
Christine Boynton:
Gael, that's a perfect segue for my final question here for you. This vision from CFM for the future, you mentioned it has the spirit of its founding fathers, will it meet or even exceed the level of industry disruption that the CFM56 has had?
Gael Meheust:
I mean, we are in the same spirit. We just like the CFM56 brought a huge improvement in performance. I think we're talking about 25%, the CFM56 versus the engine it replaced at the time. Then the LEAP brought another 15 to 20%. Now we are bringing another 20%. So we are really in the same magnitude, except that we thought a few years ago that we were reaching like an asymptote. It would be more and more difficult to squeeze performance out of an aircraft engine until our fantastic engineering team came up with this open fan idea and said, "No, no, guys, we can push the border further, the frontier further." But why do you think we can make it? Because in the 1980s, GE tried with UDF, which was a counter-rotative open fan as well. The thing is, we are in different world. We have a super computing calculations.
We have all sorts of new aerodynamic features and tests and new material that CMCs the world has changed. So we have the ability today to make the dream that people had back in the '80s come true a little bit like when the first airplane was made. It was fulfilling the dream of Leonardo da Vinci. It's a bit the same here. People had this idea in the '80s, couldn't make it work because technology was not available. Now with the brilliant engineers that we have at CFM, 2,000 people are currently working full-time on that project. We see the frontier being pushed back and a new world of performance is ahead of us. So yes, we are very enthusiastic. Challenges, there will be challenges. Of course, there will be challenges. It's not going to be an easy journey, but we're prepared. We have the right mindset for that. Thanks to Ravaud and Neumann.
Christine Boynton:
Wow, thank you. Thank you again for joining us today, Gael. This has been an incredible conversation. I know we could talk for another hour, but for now, that is a wrap for this episode of Check 6 Revisits. And again, a special thanks to Gael for being here, to Guy Norris, and to our podcast producer in London as well, Guy Ferneyhough. Special thanks also to our sponsor, CFM, for this special anniversary episode. For links to the full recordings, check the show notes on aviationweek.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll also pull from the AWNST archive and link to some of those features online as well. To delve into our archive for yourself, Aviation Week subscribers can head to archive.aviationweek.com. If you enjoyed this episode and want to help support the work we do, please head to Apple Podcasts and leave us a star rating or write a review. Thank you for listening and have a great week.
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