Podcast: How Is GE Evolving Inspections & What’s Ahead For GTF Durability?

Listen in as editors discuss the recent Pratt & Whitney GTF engine upgrades and how GE Aerospace is utilizing technology to develop new engine inspection processes.

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Rough Transcript

James Pozzi:

Welcome to the MRO Podcast. I'm James Pozzi, MRO Editor for the EMEA Regions. And today, we'll be looking at some recent news related to engine durability enhancements and repair technology and innovations, focusing on two of the industry's largest engine OEMs, Pratt & Whitney, and GE Aerospace.

So joining me today is Christine Boynton, who is a senior editor at Aviation Week, covering air transport in the Americas region. Christine has just published several interesting stories related to Pratt & Whitney's GTF program, and recently attended a briefing held by the engine manufacturer in Asheville, North Carolina.

Also joining us is Sean Broderick, a name you know very well on this podcast. He's Aviation Week's safety editor. And Sean recently, along with our colleague, Lindsay Bjerregaard, went to visit GE Aerospace at a media day held at its research center in Niskayuna, New York. Christine and Sean, thanks for joining us.

Sean Broderick:

Good to be here.

Christine Boynton:

Thanks, James.

James Pozzi:

Excellent. Let's start with the GTF then, Christine. Pratt & Whitney, obviously, several years ago unveiled its geared turbofan Advantage engine, I think around late 2021, of course for the Airbus A320neo-family aircraft. But recently, they detailed an important hot section update for GTF base model operators. How does this hot section update correlate with existing GTF engines and what are some of the enhancements the updates will bring?

Christine Boynton:

Sure. So as you mentioned, I recently had the chance to go to Asheville, North Carolina to visit Pratt & Whitney's new 1.2 million square foot airfoil production facility. And we were briefed by Rick Deurloo, president of Commercial Engines.

A large portion of that briefing focused on durability upgrades for existing GTF engines. So, for a little context, when Pratt announced the Advantage and all of its benefits, and an Advantage is of course the next generation of the GTF that will come with improved time on wing, better takeoff thrust, improved fuel burn, well, existing GTF customers of that base model were asking, "Hey, why can't you retrofit what we have?" The Advantage sounds great. Can we get some of that and the existing configuration?"

And for a bit, the answer was no. But behind the scenes, Pratt has been exploring how to do just that. So what this retrofit option will do is take that Advantage hot section and drop it into the base engine, including the combustor and panels.

James Pozzi:

And this is obviously good news for operators, many of which we know have fallen foul of some of the durability issues we've seen with the GTF over the past few years. But how much will this lead to an extension of the engines making these intervals?

Christine Boynton:

Well, what's interesting is that about 35 total parts are involved, or kind of a relatively small number. And what Pratt is saying about this retrofit is that base GTFs will get between 90 to 95% of the durability improvement offered by the Advantage variant.

And that next generation variant is supposed to basically double the time on wing of its predecessor. So that's a significant boost. And now the hot session retrofit, they were very specific about this, doesn't bring any of the thrust flexibility or improved fuel burn of the Advantage. It's aimed purely at durability.

James Pozzi:

Yeah. And what are the timeline, I guess, for the approval, and when will this be rolled out to the market? And by that, I mean be the norm in the GTF production engines?

Christine Boynton:

So this will be offered in MRO, and Pratt thinks it'll be certified by the end of the year. If that does go to plan, customers should be able to choose it in 2026.

James Pozzi:

Sure, okay. Yeah. Excellent. And surely, we'll obviously get onto some of the airlines you've been speaking to recently regarding the GTF, but maybe bringing in, Sean. Obviously, you've covered the GTF extensively as a program and some of the issues there over the last few years. What do you make of these updates and maybe what'll bring in future?

Sean Broderick:

Well, the upgrade or the drop in that Christine talked about, it's an important sort of step, a shortcut if you will, to cover all of the issues or to help all the issues that Pratt has been battling really since the introduction of the engine. These durability issues go back years, as listeners and customers know painfully well.

And Pratt, they were diligent at getting after these issues, tackling them one after the other, and then of course, the powder metal issue hit. And so that added stress to their system because their shops were already full well in advance when they expected to be full because of the engine's total time and service. They weren't expecting to see any need for shop visits as early as they needed to have them just for the durability issues.

So then you factor in the powder metal issues, which reduced life limits on key parts, requiring inspections, and ideally parts replacements, and we're going to get back to that in a minute, but requiring earlier inspections, it's created these timelines of 300 days for turnarounds.

The one big issue they have that they're not talking about in a way that I understand, and I'm trying to very careful with how I word this, 'cause I feel like I understand this pretty well. But they don't talk in clear terms about when they're going to be able to produce enough of the full life powder metal parts so that engines coming in, these gear turbofans coming in for these required inspections leave with a part that doesn't need to come in prematurely for another inspection.

They've done it. The production engines have had them for since the beginning of what, end of two years ago, I guess now it is. But in the MRO shops, they're still not getting enough of the parts to replace the ones coming in with the life limits severely chopped down. So you asked, James, how long this drop-in is going to extend the on-wing time for, it's going to extend it to the time that Pratt planned when they introduced the engines.

And so, some of these life-limited parts were cut to a point where the customers that use these engines the most, the heaviest cycle, 12, 13, 14 hours a day or whatever, they're having to come in once a year to get some of these engines inspected. And you're supposed to come in every eight or seven maybe. So if you come in and you don't get that part replaced, then it goes back out, all they're doing is putting more engines on the back of this curve that's going to last at least through 2026.

So all that's a long way of saying that the drop-in is a really nice way to get rid of all of these issues, because the new hot sections are going to have full life parts from the jump. And it eliminates all these issues, doesn't give the technical, the performance upgrades, but at this point, I think most of the Pratt customers are really happy with how the engine performs when it's on wing.

The issues they've had have been not reliability, nothing with the geared turbofan architecture. It's just old school problems with the old school parts. They're Advanced parts, but problems with classic parts in the engines, that from a durability standpoint, Pratt just didn't get right. So this is a big fix.

If they can get those into the existing engines, then they get the Advantage in, which is that step change engine, I think by the end of '26, '27 is supposed to be the standard coming off the production line, something like that. Perhaps it's finally moving in the right direction. It's taken them a while. So this drop-in is sort of that last little part to have a step change on the major issues that have been plaguing the engine for half a decade or more.

Christine Boynton:

Yeah. And they'll start with the low production rate for the GTFA. And what they said at this briefing was that by 2028, they're expecting 100% of the GTFs they produce to be that Advantage variant.

Sean Broderick:

Okay. So two years. Okay.

James Pozzi:

Yes, some very interesting insights there. And I think it was a bit of a mixed picture, but Christine, you spoke to some operators recently, obviously of the GTF in North America where you are based, particularly one they're called JetBlue. And they have some very interesting things to say about AOGs, the number of engines that are grounded, for example, and the performance of the supply chain. What can you share with us about maybe some of the things JetBlue is seeing, good and bad from their side as a GTF operator?

Christine Boynton:

Sure. So, JetBlue at a recent investors event, they have said they've seen some improvements, and that actually builds on comments they made earlier in the year about observing progress, so it's kind of like a continuing improving trend. They originally expected to have related aircraft on the ground in the mid to high teens in 2025, but right now, those are in the single high digits, that's as of early June, and that's down from 10 in April. Specifically, they pointed to three main drivers of improvement, one, improvements in supply chain, two, faster turnaround times in the shop, and three, they've noticed engines staying on wing slightly longer than expected.

James Pozzi:

So definitely a more positive picture, I think it's fair to say, than this time a year ago, for example?

Christine Boynton:

Yeah, I would say it's a positive trend that they're observing.

James Pozzi:

Sure. Okay. Well thank you Christine and Sean for giving us those GTF insights. And now, let's move on to GE Aerospace, as mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. Sean, with our colleague Lindsay Bjerregaard, you were at one of their press days, but as we mentioned, not in an engine shop or one of their MRO shops, it was at the GE Aerospace Research Center in the state of New York. Firstly, what-

Sean Broderick:

Niskayuna. I to practice it, too.

James Pozzi:

Had the phonetic pronunciation as well written in front of me, but I still couldn't manage that. But yeah, Sean, firstly, what took you there and what's the relation, I guess, to the aftermarket that we cover?

Sean Broderick:

So the research center is a really interesting asset in GE Aerospace's portfolio. So it was a GE Research Center had been for years, think old GE before they split. And GE, what was old GE, the branding and everything is now GE Aerospace, but their industrial power and other parts have gone away to other companies, but it used to be all GE across the board.

Well, GE Aerospace saw the value of it when they were evaluating what they wanted to look like as a company, and they said, "You know what? We're going to keep this." And basically, it is one of the few, I think one of the GE executives said they believe there may be two or three other companies that they could find at least in this country, and maybe around the world, that have something similar.

It's an advanced research center that looks at everything from how to solve some issues today, but more so how to push technologies in your area of expertise way out into the future. So a lot of the RISE work is being done there, for example, and that's Guy Norris's area. I'm not going to pretend I know about the RISE, but they talked a lot about the RISE on this tour.

But other things that they're looking at pair well with their MRO-focused lab, the stack that they opened in Evendale earlier this year. This was a briefing heading into the summer air show season, and they talked about some of the advanced repair development that they are doing to not so much to handle the newer materials that are coming in, advanced use of CMC or the ceramic matrix composites and things like that, but just things to get more repairs out into the field faster.

So two areas are interesting. So I was able to visit the stack earlier this year. And after this visit, putting two things together, the two sort of big buckets that I put their work in is, one, is better use of manpower, and the other one is simply approved technology. On the manpower side, if you think about a visual inspection, so they do a lot of things where they're automating portions of inspections.

So you think of a visible inspection process on an engine part, like a big disk, and it could take a technician half a day or a day or more, 12 hours, 14 hours to visually inspect the disks, looking for potential flaws that then need to be analyzed. And they're using a mirror and a flashlight, and they're looking at every surface of the disk. And it is an arduous task. One that requires learning 20 pages of an inspection manual guide in order to do the work.

And if you think about the variability of the human factors aspect of this, asking anybody to do it consistently day after day is really difficult. So what they have done is come up with a way to use robots, and in one case, white light to remove the human element from the data collection part of the visual inspection.

And they've done this with borescope, same kind of thing with a borescope, where instead of manually sticking a borescope up in the eight ports on an engine or whatever it is to do blade inspections, they've got a way that it's automated so you get the blade spinning and the images being captured consistently every time. So that's a manpower issue that helps in an number of ways. If you think about it, if you need less people doing that, you've got more people doing other things, or you just have to find fewer people. And in this day and age, it's not necessarily a bad thing.

So then they take the images, and humans are still involved, of course. Once you get AI to look at these things and flag a potential flaw, then you get the human experts to look at it and say, "Okay, yeah, that's something that needs to be repaired." And the technology they use means that those experts don't necessarily have to be where the part is, which is another manpower advantage. So you could have experts at GE Wales helping somebody in the field if they look at the images, or somebody back in Evendale looking at the images that are collected in Wales. So, big stuff that they're doing here, already rolling it out.

Now, the second thing where the research center is a little bit more involved is advanced repairs that reduce scrap rates. That's the easiest way to put it. So, one example is turbine nozzle is made of a specific nickel alloy. Processes now allow you to repair basically [inaudible 00:15:09] cracks up to a certain size.

Well, the research center, the stack, and then actually GE Singapore engine shop are coming up with a new process that basically is going to allow this brazing process to be used to repair bigger cracks. So you take a turbine nozzle, for example, a new furnace is going to clean it and do a different prep process. Then they've also got a filler material. The filler material is what is being developed at the research center in Niskayuna.

You combine these two things, and I'm oversimplifying the process, this is going to take a year or so to develop, but what you're going to get is a process that enables turbine nozzles that are now scrapped to be kept in service. Now, that's going to save airlines money, but the other thing that's going to do, it's going to make more parts available.

And if you go back to the issue we were just talking about with Pratt, anytime you can save a part, especially in one of these Advanced parts, that's one less part that you have to make, and lends less pressure on the supply chain. So that's really what the research center is doing. About 30% of the work they said is on things that are happening now. Not necessarily all MRO stuff, but yeah, about 30% of the work is today's stuff, and the 70% of it's the pie in the sky stuff.

James Pozzi:

Interesting. I was about to ask, yeah, what's in action at the moment and what's being rolled out? So around 30%, you said?

Sean Broderick:

Yeah, and it's combined. They've done a lot of work on GE9X there, they're doing a lot of work on RISE. They're doing work I'm sure that they can't even talk about. This facility, it's literally next door to a nuclear research facility that the navy has that nobody talks about that's apparently one of these top secret things.

And I have been to engine shops, I've been to a lot of facilities. I have never been to a facility that is locked down as the GE research center. They have a lodge on site. They escort you to your lodge, you have to have a badge to go anywhere, they bring the food in. It was like being on some sort of military-esque kind of base.

Our defense folks would've been much more used to it than I was. Fascinating experience. And one that really gave me an appreciation for how much or how heavy GE is leaning into advanced research, even in the MRO world, because they recognize that repair development, the pace is unbelievable for the leap. We've talked about it on this podcast, and that our MRO shows, the new materials require new and more repairs and there have more engines in the field sooner. And so everything is just moving faster, and they're keeping up on the MRO side with investments and work like it's going on at the research center. Just a fascinating experience.

James Pozzi:

Yeah. Well, Sean, you've really given us a great taster there to the article, which is obviously on aviationweek.com. And you can read more about what Sean and Lindsay saw and what they spoke about with GE at the site, and it's well worth the read.

And obviously, Christine's GTF articles are also, of course, on aviationweek.com, and you can read those there as well. Some really interesting stuff from the manufacturer, and also some airline news related to GTF, so well worth checking out. Anyway, we've come to the end there, Amazingly. Well, Sean and Christine, thank you so much for joining us on the MRO Podcast and giving us those engine insights.

Christine Boynton:

Thanks, James.

Sean Broderick:

Thanks.

James Pozzi:

Brilliant. And don't miss the next podcast by subscribing to the MRO Podcast wherever you listen. And one last request. If you're listening in Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, please leave us a star rating or right to review. Thank you.