This week at the Paris Air Show, Rolls-Royce and General Electric have both provided peaks into what they are developing for future engines to power new aircraft coming from Boeing and Airbus in the A350 and 787-10.
Rolls-Royce was the first to announce that it will be making a major revamp to its Trent 1000 for the 787-10, including further upgrades that are coming in Package C which was created for the 787-9. Some of the core scaling up will come from the Trent XWB which RR is developing for the A350-1000. The scaling up will add an additional 5,000lbs of thrust to the 76,000lb Trent 1000, Mark King, president of RR reported to Flightglobal this week.
Boeing still has yet to give exact specifications as to what the characteristics to the 787-10 will be other than a larger version of the -8 that will fly up to 7,000nm. Boeing has suggested that the aircraft will be in service no earlier than 2016.
Boeing has, however, started flight testing on the Package B Trent 1000’s for Rolls-Royce as 787 ZA004 is currently equipped with the new engines.
On the General Electric side, they have said that they will begin testing of an advanced compressor next year to work on a GE-90 replacement and that the program will be called the GE9X. The announcement follows fellow engine makers Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney expressing interest in powering Boeing’s Next Generation 777, now known as the 777X, should Boeing decide to move ahead with it..
The GE9X plan calls for an even more improved version of today’s GEnx compressor currently powering the 787-8 and 747-8. It will be using a second generation advanced engineering core at the heart of the CFM Leap and Tech X engine programs. The president of GE Aircraft Engines, David Joyce says, “This is the next step of Gen 2 of the engineering core which is the GE9X.”
