Podcast: Paris Air Show Commercial Highlights

This year’s highlights from Le Bourget include a massive airplane order and the looming AAM shakeout. Listen in as Aviation Week break down the developments.

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GE Aerospace is helping move the world forward for today and generations to come. Follow GE Aerospace on LinkedIn and Instagram for highlights of their participation at the Paris Air Show. The future of flight starts now.

Joe Anselmo:       

Welcome to the second edition of Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast from the 2023 Paris Air Show. I'm Joe Anselmo, editorial director. And yesterday you heard from military editors about defense developments here at Le Bourget. Today we're going to talk about civil aviation with Jens Flottau and Guy Norris and we have a special guest, Aviation Week Editor Graham Warwick, who is an integral part of an AAM show here in Paris, put on by Aviation Week and the air show organizers. And Graham is the happiest of all that there's no video here because someone just bumped into him and spilled coffee all over his pretty white shirt. So luckily no one can see you, Graham.

Jens, let's kick off with you. I think you've covered at least what so far is the biggest news here at the show, an order for 500 aircraft. One of our people looked at the screen and said, "That's got to be a mistake."

Jens Flottau: 

Nope, it wasn't a mistake. It was actually true. It was a firm order. And I remember two weeks ago I bumped into the CEO of IndiGo in Istanbul at the IATA AGM Annual General Assembly and we were asking him about the order because there had already been rumors and all he had to say was, "No comment." So two weeks later, sure enough, we're seeing him again in Paris on stage with Guillaume Faury, with Christian Scherer from Airbus and he confirmed it, 500 A320neo aircraft to be delivered between 2030 and 2035. Obviously India is a huge market already. It's supposed to grow by 7% annually and that's just the domestic market. It's by far the fastest growing market in civil aviation. And IndiGo being at a 55% market share right now obviously wants to make sure that it will participate in that growth. Keep in mind, Air India a couple of weeks earlier had ordered 470 aircraft from Airbus and Boeing in its efforts to retake a leading position in the country.

Joe Anselmo:   

And you just interviewed the Airbus CEO, Mr. Faury, who confirmed that Airbus is hoping to introduce a new airplane to the market in 2035. But these are current generation, right? They're ordering current generation airplanes all the way up to that 2035 timeframe.

Jens Flottau:      

Yes, they are. That's A320neos, A321neos. One of the interesting open questions is how many A321XLRs they are going to order. According to our own data, they have 70 on firm order from a previous Airbus commitment. I'm sure there'll be at least that many from this order and that obviously will be a huge threat to other airlines both in Europe, in the Middle East and in Asia because they will enable IndiGo to fly nonstop to almost anywhere in Europe or almost anywhere in Asia. There's one caveat. India has a quite restrictive bilateral service regime with many countries, including there's no comprehensive agreement with the European Union, so they're not free to fly wherever they want. That needs to be opened up, liberalized. But once that happens, off they fly.

Joe Anselmo:     

And Airbus is already having trouble filling the orders it currently has. This is going to stuff their order book really full, although I realize it's in the out years. And what percentage of Airbus' current production is this the equivalent of, just a single order?

Jens Flottau:  

Well, basically if you take just the A320neo family, it's roughly one year of production, I would say. But you have to keep in mind it's spread over five years and it starts in seven years. So yeah, they have time, but it's 80 aircraft a year for a single airline.

Joe Anselmo: 

So 20% of production at basically current rates, right?

Jens Flottau:       

Yeah, and for one airline, and obviously there's hundreds of airlines that also want new aircraft in those years, which is why airlines tend to order earlier than they used to in the past. You have a lead time of seven years now for this. That was pretty unusual just like five, 10 years ago.

Joe Anselmo:     

Guy Norris, Jens was just talking about Airbus. What was Boeing up to at the show?

Guy Norris:           

Well, I think the thing for Boeing at the show here, Joe, is the fact that the debut of both the 737-10 and the 777X, the first model, the 777-9, marked somewhat of a sort of the first step, a continuing recovery here at Paris for the company. Both of them are yet to be certified. And all of the discussion really was, for example, on the 777-9, when type inspection authorization is going to be approved, which will clear the aircraft for the final run-up to certification permitting that entry in the service in 2025.

Similarly, with the 737-10, we got a chance to -- of course we saw it at Farnborough last year -- but this was another opportunity to talk to them about what was happening with the changes as a result of the MAX accidents. So we got a little bit more of an insight into that and the fact that they're starting to install those changes now. So it's sort of interesting to me that Airbus brought the A321XLR to the show, which is doing its debut here as well. So you had the two arch rivals flying in the display. It's sort of an interesting time really to see the dynamics after all these years of talking about it, seeing them actually flying in the display is sort of interesting.

Joe Anselmo:   

Well, speaking of dynamics, there's some interesting dynamics going on in the engine industry, aircraft engines. Tell us about those.

Guy Norris:    

A lot of it is to do with improvements in upgrades and the challenges that these new engine generations are facing, certainly in terms of durability. So the LEAP engine, the CFM on the 737 and A320, has been suffering durability issues and CFM were actually talking about how they're really going to fix the issue and revealing some new details about something called the reverse bleed system, which is basically a way of blowing out debris from inside the engine through the bleed system to prevent it overheating and going beyond a critical threshold inside the engine. And that's sort of been a problem that they've had with that. Also, redesign of the HP Turbine stage 1 that you and I saw a few weeks back in Cincinnati.

On the Pratt side of things, we got confirmation finally that Pratt & Whitney has been selected by Boeing for the newly designated X-66, the NASA sustainable flight demonstrator or the transonic truss-braced wing. I'm kind of glad that I'll just have to be able to say X-66 from now on, TTBW is a bit of a tongue twister. But the weird thing about the Pratt selection, it's sort of, could this be a window into the future? It's the first time Boeing has selected a Pratt engine for a single-aisle airplane since the last 757 was delivered in the early 2000s. That's a long time. And also, CFM has had exclusivity on the 737 now for 40 years. Just imagine that, 40 years. Maybe Boeing sort of signaling there's a chance here, maybe we could be looking at some kind of different future for single-aisle engine options.

Joe Anselmo:      

Graham Warwick, I'm a little biased, but you guys put on a great AAM show here. You, Lee Ann Shay, Ben Goldstein, the three editors, Juliet Trew, our producer. But one thing that struck me, you had all the leading AAM companies here and I was wondering is this the last hurrah? I mean these guys are burning through cash so fast, what's it going to look like if we come back in two years?

Graham Warwick:  

Yeah, some of them are not going to be here in two years' time. They all kind of acknowledged that 2024 really is the crunch year. '24 is when Volocopter is supposed to come back to Paris and fly commercial air taxi flights during the Paris Olympics. They think they can do it, although they admit it's a challenge to get through. They've got to get the aircraft type certified, they've got to get operating approval, they've got to have enough aircraft to run a service, and they've got to get all the infrastructure in place. They unveiled the routes here that will be in place for the Olympics. So they know it's a challenge. And then the others, Archer is here with a full-size Midnight, which Guy saw for the first time a few minutes ago and said, "Wow, that's big." So they want to get certified by the end of 2024. Joby wants to get certified by the end of 2024. So there's a lot of challenges and so some of these will not be here.

But the thing that is really interested me, I'm talking to the established aerospace companies that are working with these people. So GKN, Spirit, Honeywell, suppliers, and the guy at GKN told me, he said, "Every single technology that these guys need from us is the same thing that Airbus and Boeing need for their next-generation single-aisle.” They want high-rate composites, they want to get to those high production rates very quickly when they get those new airplanes into service. So it's all about out-of-autoclave composites, it's about getting rid of fasteners, and it's about simplifying structures. And he said, "Everything that we're doing for these guys is what Airbus and Boeing want for their next airplane. So we as a company think this is a great market to get into because we will have our hands around all those technologies when the big guys come back to us and say they want something."

So, yes, the industry's going to have casualties, but the technology, it would appear, is going to continue to have its mark for a long time round. We just don't know what this market's going to look like. I'm actually a bit more positive about it than I was because all the OEMs were very measured about the fact it's going to take time to get this market off the ground, the actual services. And that's the first time I've really heard them not come up with stupid numbers for the numbers of airplanes they want to build or number of cities they want to fly in. They admitted it's going to take time to get people to fly in these things. And that, for me, was a sobering but good message.

Joe Anselmo:            

And I've heard a number of people say, "You're not going to get to scale in these projects until you can be autonomous, until you can fly without a pilot. The numbers just don't crunch." Do you agree with that?

Graham Warwick:    

Yeah, but you can't rely on waiting for it because if that's in the hands of the certification authorities, when will they allow autonomous flight? Wisk is going autonomous from Day One. They won't say when they will certify. They want to be flying by the end of the decade. But in your guys' interview with Boeing CEO Calhoun, the second thing he said after truss braced wing was autonomy for the next-generation airplane. By the end of this decade, Wisk should have a fully autonomous system certified to 10 to the minus nine commercial aviation safety level that is ready to be ported over into the next single aisle. Again, that's this industry getting the industry ready for the next single aisle, which is just a really interesting dynamic.

Joe Anselmo:  

Guys, we're staggering to the finish line at this air show. All air shows are a gruel. What other stories did you see here that are worth telling our listeners about?

Guy Norris:    

Well, I think one of the notable ones, of course it's always a news gatherer, is the Boom Supersonic update. They came out with some more details about their aerostructure partners in Italy and Spain. So, they are starting to build up this cadre of partners. They won't say much in the way of whether they're risk sharing or how it's working out, but Blake Scholl, the founder of the company, says they have “skin in the game.” So I don't know, we just have to read into that what we shall. But they also talked about their mysterious Symphony engine. They gave more details of it. They actually had a third-scale mock-up in their chalet. And so it's becoming quite intriguing really to see whether can it possibly be true.

Graham Warwick: 

Yeah, but I would point out that Aerion got to this stage. They had all their suppliers, they had Spirit on board, they had Honeywell on board, and they failed. They just couldn't get the money, anybody to put in the tens of hundreds of millions they needed, the billions that Boom needs to do it. Just having suppliers on board does not mean to say you're going to get an airplane into service.

Guy Norris:    

But they are certainly attracting at least this interest from United, American, JAL, sort of blue chip companies have at least indicated this serious interest and in some case put down money on nonrefundable deposits. And they are pouring concrete and erecting steel at a factory in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Joe Anselmo:       

But they're not saying how much money and “skin in the game” is not a number, right? They are very vague on these. They're trying to imply that these companies are putting money down, but they won't say how much.

Guy Norris:        

No, they won't, but the dream is still alive as far as they're concerned. So let's wish them good luck.

Joe Anselmo:  

Jens, what other insights did you glean from the show?

Jens Flottau:     

I would like to direct our attention to another sector of this industry, which is regional. ATR, Deutsche Aircraft trying to revive the Dornier 328, or a stretch of it, and Embraer. And you have to say they're all not doing great. No orders for ATR, small orders for Embraer. It seems as though the traditional regional aircraft industry is clearly suffering and it's not surprising that they are ahead of this wave of hybrid electric AAM, all these new technologies that are about to arrive in the industry, that are about to be used in new applications, like the Heart Aerospace ES-30. So, you feel that through the lack of orders for the traditional sector. That must be really worrying for them. They will of course not admit that, but it's something to be watched and something to be reacted to if they want to still be part of the game in a few years.

Guy Norris:     

Yeah, and just to add to that, Jens is absolutely right. A lot of the time we've spent rushing around the chalets is to listen to briefings about megawatt generator developments and plans to hybridize the GTF under the various clean aviation programs. It's all about evolving to the next era, the new age. And I'm not surprised there's hesitancy in these areas where they're going to be affected first by this new technology.

Joe Anselmo:    

Okay, guys, well, we're all very tired, but thank you for taking the time to share your insights. It's always great working with all of you and we'll be heading home soon and jumping back into this after maybe a little bit of rest. That is a wrap for this Check 6 podcast. A special thanks to our editor onsite with us, Guy Ferneyhough. Be sure to join us again next week for another Check 6. And if you want to see what happened at the air show, be sure to download Aviation Week's new air show app, aviationweek.com/app. You can read the multiple stories filed here by Jens, Guy, and Graham. That's it for today. Have a wonderful week and stay safe.

Sponsor Message:   

GE Aerospace is helping move the world forward for today and generations to come. Follow GE Aerospace on LinkedIn and Instagram for highlights of their participation at the Paris Air Show. The future of flight starts now.