Comment: March 2013 Archives

It boasts world-leading companies, but Canada's aerospace industry - one of the world's biggest - is in danger of lagging in an increasingly globally competitive market. Blessed with a long heritage of aerospace manufacturing, top technical schools, its own OEMs and privileged access to the largest military marketplace, Canada's industry has had every chance to thrive.
However, proximity to the end-customer has bred complacency. As airframers, including Canada's Bombardier, have switched from local build-to-print contractors to scouring the planet for risk-sharing, system integrators with their own supply chains, some of the country's smaller firms have been slow to react.
US defence cuts have also impacted Canadian industry, which has competed on near-equal terms with firms south of the border for access to programmes.
The nation must act on its shortcomings: tier ones investing in design engineering capabilities and marketing themselves on the global stage; "mom and pops" consolidating, identifying what they are best at and collaborating to increase their value up the supply chain.
The challenge is considerable. Emerging industries, from Mexico to Poland and South Korea to Brazil, are becoming more competitive every year. But with supply-chain initiatives at federal level as well as in Ontario and Quebec, Canada at least acknowledges it has a problem and is doing something about it.

(The following article appeared as a leading article in Flight International 26 March 2013)

There was a sense of déjà vu, and similar mixture of feelings, when Boeing announced on 15 March that only a General Electric engine will power the 777X.
Boeing's decision comes 14 years after the 115,000lb-thrust (67kN) variant of the GE90 gained a landmark exclusivity deal on the 777-200LR and 777-300ER, in return for GE's commitment to invest $100 million to help Boeing develop the airframes and another $500 million to develop and certificate the engine.
Once again, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce have walked away as the losers in an increasingly dead-locked engine battle worth hundreds of billions, if a broad consensus of market forecasts are to be believed.
The dual-engined 787 programme now looks like an aberration in the modern twin-aisle market.
Exclusivity deals, whether formalised in the case of the 777 or de facto in the case of the Airbus A350XWB, appear to be the norm in the twin-aisle segment.
Engine choice has never been a right in the aircraft industry. The exclusive deal between Boeing and GE-Snecma joint venture CFM to power the 737 pre-dated the 777-200LR/300ER selection by decades. Regional jet makers dwelling in the thinnest slice of the air transport pie chart never offer more than
one engine.
Demand limitations, however, have never been quite the same issue in the twin-aisle sector, at least in the post-trijet era. Boeing partly sold the exclusivity deal for the GE90 to European regulators in the late-1990s by claiming there was only a market for up to 500 ­777-200LR and -300ERs combined. We now know differently. Boeing's order tally stands at 745 - and counting. There has also never been a lack of competitive performance. The GE90 struggled to compete with Rolls-Royce and P&W engines on the original 777, before higher-power variants evolved to set a new industry standard. In the latest contest, the Rolls-Royce bid featured an engine with a slightly higher overall pressure ratio than the GE9X.
In some ways, the airlines brought this on themselves. By playing one engine maker against the other and forcing engines to sell almost free, the airlines created an unsustainable situation and forced some of the engine makers to react by pursuing exclusivity.
It is now the engine makers' turn to deal with the consequences of an unsustainable market trend. As long as there are only two Western airframe makers and three engine suppliers signing only exclusive pacts, something will have to give.

If airline passengers knew what a lottery the route to an airline pilot's first job was in Europe, there would be more white knuckles gripping armrests at take-off and landing.
The European Cockpit Association has made a study of the inconsistencies in today's pilot supply system. The first observation is that there is no system, but multiple routes. All pilots, of course, have to get a licence, but so do all car drivers, and it is common knowledge that rather than indicate quality, a licence only proves a minimum legal standard on the day of the test.
Becoming a pilot today, the ECA observes, requires a personal investment of more than €100,000 ($130,000), so as the only aspirants that can raise the finance are rich - or have rich parents - the airlines are fishing in an artificially small pool. The other factor related to the cost is that the pressure to economise on training is high for both the pilots and the airline. Add to that the seemingly intuitive belief that today's flying is so highly automated that pilots don't really need the skills any more, and the result is what the ECA calls "one-dimensional and incomplete" training for pilots.
The industry knows this is true, but modern aircraft are so reliable that fatal accidents are rare, so while the airlines can get away with it, nothing will change. As Flight International has observed before, there is much hand-wringing going on, but no action. ■

(This first appeared as a Comment in Flight International 19 March 2013)

Should everything now go according to plan, the Boeing 787 will be flying passengers again before the Paris air show in June. The entire grounded fleet will be back in service within a few months. The battery crisis that erupted on 7 January may be a distant memory by year-end, barely even noticeable in Boeing's results.
However, many questions about how the 787 got to this point and how Boeing has responded to this lithium-ion battery affair remain unanswered. Safety investigators in the USA and Japan still do not know why the 787's lithium-ion batteries malfunctioned in two instances, but do understand why those malfunctions triggered a "thermal runaway" chain reaction. The explanation is simple enough to beggar belief that the overheating problem was not caught during certification. There is inadequate separation within and between each of the eight cells of the GS Yuasa-supplied batteries, and the overall enclosure and venting arrangement is insufficient for the power and temperatures produced by these 32V lithium-ion batteries.
Boeing's plan, accepted by the US Federal Aviation Administration on 12 March, keeps the battery design and chemistry essentially unchanged, but improves the separation, containment and venting inside and around the cells. If the batteries ever malfunction again, these changes are aimed at preventing the first problem from causing a much larger second problem, such as a fire or the release of toxic smoke into the passenger cabin.
Boeing calls this plan a "permanent solution" for the 787's battery problems; the FAA describes it as a "comprehensive" fix. Neither can know that for sure, however, until the safety investigations run their course.
More worrisome, potentially, is the lack of a back-up plan. Contrary to public messaging, Boeing has more than one option. Not all involve the drastic step of keeping the 787s grounded until the lithium-ion batteries are replaced with less powerful and proven nickel-cadmium batteries. A simpler path would be launching an alternate certification programme with nickel-cadmium, while continuing to pursue recertification of an improved installation of the lithium-ion batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries are a new and unproven aviation technology. The 787 is the only operational aircraft to use them as a primary back-up power source for the electrical system.
Boeing's insistence on a lithium-ion-only recovery strategy may yet prove successful, but smacks of undeserved over-confidence. ■

(The following article first appeared as a Comment in 12 March 2013 Flight International)

Three years after Frank Robinson retired from leading his eponymous light helicopter company, his competitors are only now starting to play catch-up.
Bell Helicopter did nothing as Robinson launched work on a light turbine in 2001, and remained frozen as he made a deal with Rolls-Royce to develop the RR300 engine in 2005 and got the R66 certificated in 2010.
The R66 was aimed squarely at the end of the market Bell dominated with the B47 and B206 JetRanger. Bell, however, was preoccupied with ushering the V-22 tiltrotor into service and shoring up its neglected line-up of light and medium-twin helicopters.
That created an opportunity Robinson seemed to covet, for a simplified light-single helicopter. Market appeal had already been established by Eurocopter: 500 EC120s were delivered between 1998 and 2008.
However, the R66's simplicity and, by implication, bottom-dollar price tag have made it a market leader. In only the second full year of production, Robinson delivered 191 R66s in 2012, weekly output ramping up from three to six during the year. That success has not escaped Bell's attention, and it is poised to respond.
The Fort Worth-based manufacturer must re-learn how to design, certificate and build a popular helicopter priced below $1 million. If it succeeds, it can thank a former employee - Frank Robinson worked at Bell for two years nearly half a century ago. ■

(The following article first appeared as a Comment in the 12 March 2013 Flight International)

When Flight International analysed the prospects for Airbus's vaguely-named "SA" single-aisle twinjet in 1980, it declared that the "crucial question" facing the programme was "whether such an aircraft can compete against the attractions of aircraft such as the 737-300".
If the internet had been around back then, Airbus's response might simply have echoed a popular web-based meme: "challenge accepted".
And how. After the A300 had hesitantly knocked on the door during the US-led manufacturing party, the A320 - controversial in its concept, but brilliant in its execution - simply gatecrashed it.
More than 1,800 have been delivered to North America, and nearly 1,000 more are still on the books. And just to underline the point, if such emphasis is even necessary, the future production line at Alabama means the new-fangled video-game jet won't just be competing against the 737 - it will be carrying its own "Made in the USA" stickers.
The A320 has become so ubiquitous and its features so familiar in other modern jet designs, that the young pilots training to step into its cockpit today might not appreciate the stir its arrival created, a flavour of which Flight International captured when it flight-tested the type in 1987.
Fly-by-wire technology, electronic display screens, computers which gave the impression of knowing more than they rightly should. Not forgetting the ­replacement of the sturdy control yoke, with all its two-handed reassurance, with a delicate sidestick. To some old-school captains it must have felt like nothing short of digitally-driven emasculation.
Sidesticks and software, the future-shock advances which defined the A320, are as much a part of the aircraft's legacy as its efficiency and economics. This aircraft, externally modest and unassuming, internally symbolises an entire Airbus philosophy and, from the outset, has fuelled arguments about the wisdom and benefits of advancement and automation.
With the A320, a smouldering transatlantic airliner battle blossomed into flame. How appropriate that, 25 years on, it finds itself clashing with another ambitious upstart from the other side of the ocean, the Canadian-built CSeries, with its own array of fly-by-wire architecture, whizz-bang avionics and - in case you missed them - sidesticks. If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, the A320 ought to feel incredibly smug. ■

(This first appeared as a Comment in the 5 March 2013 issue of Flight International)

EADS chief executive Tom Enders can be excused for showing no job-security anxiety about the fact that one of his first acts as chief executive was to unveil an audacious merger proposal that failed spectacularly. By joining with weapons systems giant BAE Systems, he was going to resolve EADS's big headache - that its defence business lacks global scale - but 2012 financials show EADS to be in rude health, even without growth in the military business. Enders says that, with budgets being axed on both sides of the Atlantic, maybe it's not bad thing, as a business, to have relatively low exposure to defence spending.
He makes a point that begs a question: can the aerospace industry get along alright without defence?
As Airbus division results show, all indications point to rapid and durable demand growth for civil airliners. With budget austerity likely to last a generation on both sides of the Atlantic, military aerospace operations are starting to look like a drag on growth.
Anyway, military spending increasingly goes to electronic systems that make the difference in asymmetric conflicts. The aircraft platforms existing today are, arguably, good enough - so even another war might not boost traditional defence aerospace.
There is much talk of defence industry consolidation. Don't be surprised if the result in aerospace is a separation into civil and military specialists.

(This article first appeared as a Comment in 5 March 2013 Flight International)

If a pilot gets away with using an incorrect flying technique for long enough without a mishap, his training department assumes, wrongly, he must be using the correct technique. If that incorrect technique is then applied in a highly dynamic - but rare - manoeuvre such as a go-around, it is only a matter of time before that pilot's luck runs out catastrophically.
There has long been an assumption in the industry that a go-around is a simple manoeuvre. So embedded was this view that several catastrophes resulting from botched go-arounds were ignored as aberrations, and it was not until a near-catastrophic go-around occurred in southern England that the airline concerned decided to test its assumptions about how pilots monitored their instruments. They set up pilot eye-tracking tests in their training simulators, and discovered many pilots did not exercise a skill that - it was assumed - was fundamental to the skillset of any pilot who had earned an instrument rating. Many pilots were found to employ a haphazard instrument scan that ignored critical primary flight information for dangerously long intervals. But because the measurement of a pilot's instrument flying skill was previously based on whether the aircraft's trajectory and performance remained within certain parameters, if that was achieved by luck rather than judgement, the deficiency remained undiscovered. It needed an empirical approach such as eye-tracking to discover that assumptions about skills were wrong, and accidents were waiting to happen. Since that time, the all-engines go-around manoeuvre itself has been dissected.
It can be very demanding because change happens so fast as a result of the high power/weight ratio of modern aircraft, and because many airports have tight limitations in their missed approach procedure owing to terrain or conflicting traffic patterns.
But the industry is simultaneously trying to reduce the occurrence of the most common of all aviation accidents: the runway excursion. Runway excursions frequently follow unstabilised approaches, and going around from an unstabilised approach is one of the most effective ways of reducing overruns.
Behind the discovery made by Thomson Airways with its eye-tracking technique lurks the question of whether the loss of a disciplined instrument scan is a result of modern automated flying. Whatever the cause, the solution is a disciplined scan by the pilot flying, and a trained monitoring procedure for the pilot monitoring.