Is Airbus Running In Place?
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Welcome to the Check 6 Podcast. I'm Joe Anzalone, Aviation Week's Editorial Director. Airbus has not shared a lot of good news recently about its future aircraft programs. The pending launch of a new single-aisle aircraft keeps getting slipped to the right. And in February, the company pushed back development of a hydrogen-powered airliner by five to 10 years.

So Airbus' leaders, needing to convince the world that they're not running in place, gathered 130 journalists and influencers from around the world in Toulouse for a two-day technology summit. There they revealed initial concepts of what a new single-aisle aircraft could look like, including their preference for open-fan engines.

Critics say Airbus and Boeing are slow rolling development of new airplanes, whether shareholders cash in on massive order backlogs. The duopoly counters that the technologies needed for game changing improvements simply aren't ready for primetime.

Aviation Week's Jens Flothau, who leads our commercial aviation team, was at the Airbus Summit and joins us to share his thoughts. Also on the podcast is Chief Technology Editor Graham Warwick, who listened in on the sessions from Hindus Base in Washington, D.C., and will be joined by Technology Editor Thierry Dubois, who is based in France and closely follows sustainability and Airbus's hydrogen project. Jens, what did you see at the summit and were you impressed?

I saw a lot of the technology projects that Airbus is currently working on. The automatic taxi trials they showed us. I was even able to drive the truck that they're using as a kind of a simulator for the A350 on which this is going to be tested as well. They had an exhibition for hydrogen projects, the Zero E, some of the wing work they're doing. The message was very, very clear. Airbus wanted to show us

and us, that's 130 people, journalists, and actually a lot of influencers.

So that shows, also shows that they wanted to reach kind of a broad general audience. They clearly wanted to show us that, you know, in spite of what you said, delaying zero E, not moving quickly on next generation narrow-body, they are in the game. They are sticking to their promise to drive aviation's push into more sustainable, into more sustainable flying.

and that they're not stepping back from the targets. Keep in mind, IATA just said that the net zero 2050 target may need to be revisited because SAF isn't moving fast enough and so on, and hydrogen is going to come in too late for that target anyway. So there is this general feeling that the industry is slowly moving away from these targets, and Airbus was very optimistic

Very clear that it is not. Tariq, it's been a long time since Boeing or Airbus launched a new clean sheet narrowbody. The 737 is actually older than me. I think it was launched in 1965. The A320 entered service, I think, in 1987, our first flu. Airbus and Boeing say that this inaction to roll out new models isn't about greed or complacency. They say that technology simply isn't ready for game-changing moves. Are you buying that?

Not really. There are several technologies, including some developed by Airbus under the Wings of Tomorrow program that could be implemented in the next few years. So maybe they would not bring double digit improvement.

but it's much better than waiting another five to ten years for the next aircraft. So it's hard to buy as an argument and the issue of credibility of the entire industry was raised at the highest level you can imagine in Europe in terms of aviation, meaning the executive director of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, Florian Guillermet, he was speaking at the Clean Aviation Annual Forum in Brussels

And he said that if aviation doesn't stick to its 2035 target for significantly reduced emissions, precisely at the aircraft level, that would be minus 30% of emissions. So if the industry doesn't meet those targets, credibility will be at stake. And you didn't hide your disappointment at the demise, not the demise, but the delay of the hydrogen project. Yes, and I'm...

perplexed by the extra period of time, by the extra time that Airbus will spend working on hydrogen. So if they put their money where their mouth is, this means they will work for another 15 to 20 years on hydrogen technologies before the aircraft actually enters service.

That's an unprecedented development time for commercial aircraft. So, by the way, I'm using the word development. I should be more careful. It's research technology. But anyway, it's a very long time working on technologies before an aircraft center service. Graham Warwick, you get really excited about new technologies. Was there anything you heard in the summit that excited you?

Well, yes and no. So the hydrogen one is interesting, right? Because I kind of think they were backpedaling a bit, you know, because they announced the postponement earlier this year and it was really taken as being almost like it's off the table. It was quite a negative reaction from

to what they did and it like hydrogen's dead blah blah blah well they kind of tried to resuscitate hydrogen so no we're still working on it blah blah blah the interesting thing for me was

The reason they gave for postponing was they wanted to produce a commercially competitive aircraft. They didn't want to make another Concorde, I think is how they said it. Well, if you think about it, when they launched Zero-E, they didn't talk about competitiveness. They talked about making a disruptive move, getting hydrogen into the aviation ecosystem. And I think what's happened over the last, however long it's been, you know, three, four, five years now,

is it's the typical large OEM thinking has come to bear. So the R&T folks look at hydrogen and think, we can get a viable, minimum viable product into the market in 2035, 100 seats, 1,000 nautical miles.

but it may not be, you know, it won't have the same range as a gas turbine aircraft, blah, blah, blah. And I think what's happened is that, you know, the big boys at Airbus have said, the product guys at Airbus have said, there is no way we're going forward with an aircraft that can't compete head-on with conventional airplanes. In the timeframe, this thing's going to come along. And they've just said, give it more time, develop the technology further,

and bring out a competitive aircraft. I think that's a really big change. None of the startups are talking about being competitive. They're talking about disrupting, about getting hydrogen going. So I think Airbus has said, it's not our job. Our job is to come in with an airplane that we can put up against a conventional airplane and make commercial sense. So I think that's a big change. The second thing is, it was mentioned many times but never really highlighted,

They are really interested in hybridization. So I think that they are going to almost certainly when this new single L comes, it's going to have some degree of hybrid electric propulsion hybridization. And what they're talking about is putting an electric motor onto the engine so that you can move energy around. You can take energy out of the airplane. You can put it out of the engine. You can put energy into the engine.

and then you can reduce the edges of the envelope, the transients that take the engine to the edge of its capability and are the things that do the most damage to the engine. If you can remove those transients, you can operate the engine in a much more comfortable area and you can extend life, you can get some degree of efficiency improvement, but fundamentally you make the turbine, it doesn't have to work as hard.

if you have this energy storage and some way of putting energy in and out of the engine. So they're clearly thinking that's a big... Whether it's a fan, whether it's a turbofan, hybridisation is a big part of it. So I was actually quite encouraged that they really are thinking about that. That would be a huge step for aviation, even if it looks like a tiny step. If you actually bring electric into the propulsion somewhere or other in a middle-of-the-market, single-aisle vehicle,

thousands of airplanes type of program. That's a huge shift. Well, so Jens, they did say something that excited him. Yes, to Abba's credit, there is something that they presented.

that was quite impressive, I have to say. The RACER demonstrator, it's Airbus helicopters, so it's not a commercial fixed-wing aircraft, but it's a compound helicopter, so it's a mix between a fixed-wing aircraft and a helicopter. It's closer to a helicopter, actually. It was created under the Clean Sky 2 program, so Clean Aviation predecessor, and it proved that a different architecture demonstrator is feasible

And in only a few years, it was relatively fast by aviation standards. And it's been flying for, I can't remember, six months or one year, probably about around six months. And apparently the engineers are very happy and the pilots are very happy with it, with the performance in terms of speed and fuel efficiency. So that's quite encouraging in the way that, again, shows you can change the architecture of an aircraft and demonstrate it in a few years.

And the aircraft flew from Marignane to Toulouse. Jens, you talked about how they unveiled the concept for the next generation single aisle, which I should say is not going to be for at least 10 years, right? Probably longer before we see something like that in service. Probably longer, yeah. Share with our listeners some of the details. As you said, there weren't a lot, but there were some conceptual things there, right?

Basically, they're trying to follow three different concepts for now. They're studying three different concepts right now. One is conventional ducted engine, low wing. The other one is open fan, low wing. And the other one is the engines, still low wing, but still the engines at the rear of the aircraft, which would be a departure from the traditional Airbus aircraft architecture. The big...

The main message that I took away from this is they don't know much about the aircraft. They said, we don't know what it's going to look like. It could be completely different from what we're showing you. They showed some sketches of a tube and wing aircraft, but they're clear favourites.

on the engine side is the open fan. They actually had GE Aerospace's Muhammad Ali at the show presenting his view of the engine, giving an update on development and testing and Thierry maybe can talk about that a little more. He had some interesting details to share. But Airbus is clearly on the path of

trying to make the open rotor work, which has huge implications, obviously, for the market as a whole.

MTU, part of the Pratt consortium has said that it will go for a ducted conventional iteration of the DTF for the next generation narrowbody. And obviously you can't design an aircraft for an open fan. They can also accommodate a ducted fan. That doesn't work.

If Airbus really insists on the open fan, does that mean that Pratt needs to also look at open fan technology to secure a place on the aircraft?

Or maybe Airbus decides it doesn't need two engines because it's got 60, 65% of the narrow body market anyway. If you look at GE Aerospace, the market share is even higher. It's 100% on the max and it's whatever, 70, 60, 70% on the NIO. So maybe they are in the position to just say, you know what, we'll just go with one engine.

To be fair, that's CFM, that's GE and Saffron. Yes. I couldn't help. So there were a couple of things that were interesting. These artist impressions are incredibly vague and sort of simplistic. But they did, of course, feature the long span wing with the folding wingtips, which they're developing under their Wing of Tomorrow program.

But when I was listening, there was no mention of what's going on under the Extreme Performance Wing Program. No mention of making it active. You know, where that wing would move in flight to control gusts. So I think...

I think as in its first form, it's just going to be a passive, you know, a land fold wing taxi in, taxi out, fold the wing back down, and then it's fixed, you know. So now in a later stage, obviously they could make that active. Also, you know, our colleague Guy Norris talked a lot about the installation issues with them.

open fan and that's why they've got this tail versus wing thing because there are advantages for an open rotor there are advantages to being under the wing and disadvantages and then the same of the tail so if it's under the wing noise is more of an issue it's the tail noise is less of an issue but what you did see in the concepts is this idea of a gull or an arched wing

which is a bit like what the H380 wing is like, where the wing goes up inboard quite steeply to give that clearance to the ground for an open rotor, which would be a very large diameter. So you saw those sort of things in these concepts. On the open fan, Mohamed Ali, so the GeoRospace Senior VP Engineering, shared something encouraging in terms of testing. He said that digital modeling, the digital models they used

for the OpenFAN were extremely accurate when compared to wind tunnel tests. Which means that in future the development of the engine could be relatively fast and they could rely maybe more heavily on digital models. Of course they would still use wind tunnels but that may accelerate things.

Airbus isn't operating in a vacuum. They have a great advantage in single aisles, as you noted. But Boeing's still out there. Just got a big shot in the arm on the military side last week, winning the F-47 contract. What is Boeing doing compared to Airbus? And how do they differ? Boeing would never have done an event like the Airbus summit. It was a very, very slick event.

outwardly focused event. It really wasn't focused on the aerospace press who really dig into the details. This was, as Yen says, this was focused at the widest possible audience they could reach.

That's not the Boeing that we see at the moment. Even if they're doing this work in the background, they're not doing anything to promote that work, establish themselves as being a technology leader. So that's a huge difference. You couldn't have seen an event like this take place in the US. Okay. But they are looking at a trust-raised wing, right? That a lot of people are skeptical about and not to think...

So TrustBase Wing is there. It's in the mix. It's a bit like OpenFan. It has to prove itself. You know, I mean, Airbus is very enthusiastic about OpenFan, but it has to prove itself. It will have to fly on the A380 testbed and it will have to demonstrate what it promises and overcome all the installation issues that go with a totally new type of engine. One of the things you have to remember, the Airbus Summit, the people up there are the research and technology people, as Thierry said.

they made it quite clear they're not the people who decide what the product is. As they tried to explain it, they're the people who are putting up the menu of ingredients, but it's the product team that do the recipe that produces an aircraft. And they have said time and time again, they have no idea what the product people are going to decide. They're trying to give those product people the widest range of options that they possibly can. But the product side, a bit like on hydrogen and things, but that side may say, no, no, that's,

that the market doesn't it's not ready that doesn't buy its way on so all they can do is tell us what they're working on they cannot yet tell us what will make it onto the airplane it's exactly the same with trespass wing it's there it's being tested it has to prove itself but nobody can tell you it's going to be on the airplane until the product people design an airplane and the product people are saying we have this huge backlog on the other side

we're not in any hurry to move. I mean, they're not saying this officially, but I would say that's the truth. Boeing has its own issues that we've written and talked about a lot. And Embraer is still pondering whether to move at all into that space. So it's a very slow process. I think it's slower than justified by the

technology readiness. I think technology, as Thierry says, I think technology would be there sooner than they are planning to use it. But that's not the only factor that plays into this whole game. So there we are.

So final question, Graham mentioned disruptors. I think one of the most prominent is Jet Zero, the blended wing body project that's sort of a dual military tanker and airliner, very different aircraft. But the fact that Airbus is moving so slow and Boeing is moving slow, does that open the door wider for a disruptor to jump in? That's the hope of European aviation, especially the clean aviation joint undertaking. For a couple of years, they've put a new emphasis on startups,

And maybe they don't see it that way, but maybe they don't see it this way, but because of the slow speed of progress at established manufacturers, they are hoping that the startup may come with something disruptive. And someone from the Cambridge University Clean Aviation Annual Forum even said that aviation may be waiting for its Tesla moment.

He didn't phrase it exactly that way, but it was that gave the impression that aviation was waiting for something to happen.

So I agree. I think that, you know, the reason that Jet Zero exists at all is because Airbus and Boeing are not moving fast enough. I mean, what Jet Zero is trying to do, a startup trying to do a $12 billion aircraft development program to bring a totally new 200 seat aircraft to market is just unheard of. And, you know, and it's never, never, ever been done. But they're encouraged by, you know,

people inside and outside the interest who are frustrated at what Airbus and Boeing are doing. You know, some of Airbus and Boeing's biggest customers are saying they're not moving fast enough.

So, Delta, big customer, it's not putting money into Jet Zero, but it's encouraging Jet Zero. And they tell you there's no shortage of money available in the private market to do this if they can cross the credibility barrier and if the investor can be convinced, A, that it's going to be a successful product, and B, that Airbus and Boeing won't put them out of business within six months like they did with Bombardier in the C-series. So, yeah.

It's clearly a moment in time when there is an opportunity, but there are many, many ways that that opportunity could be dropped. You know, if Jet Zero doesn't do what it says it can do, or if there's some sort of global financial shift that makes the money really hard to get a hold of. But there's definitely, and it is interesting what Kateri says, you know, clean aviation, which has been since the beginning of Clean Sky, utterly dominated by the major companies

European OEMs, the money has gone to Rolls, Safran, Airbus, Leonardo for years and years and years. And now in a small way, they're saying, okay, no, there's another piece to aviation. So Zero Avia was there at the conference talking, you know, things like that. These are people who are the disruptors. They're small disruptors. They're starting in a small way, but they're getting recognition and they're getting recognition because the big guys are not doing anything.

So it's really now can those little guys cross over and get the bigger investment dollars from the really big institutional and other private sources that can get this moving. And we're still way off of knowing whether that's going to happen or not. But the opportunity has opened.

And there's also a very near-term example of how people are not moving, how everything in this space in case it's not moving. A220, we've been talking about the stretched version of the A220 for, I don't know how many years, five years or so. It's still not there. But the reality is,

There's big customers. Delta wants it. Air France wants it. A lot of airlines want it as soon as possible. But the reality is Airbus can do whatever they want because what will Delta do? What will Air France do? If they don't get the stretch, they'll probably buy an A320 NEO. So who cares? I mean, if you're Airbus, you couldn't care less. And that's the problem.

Well, unfortunately, we are out of time, but we will definitely continue this discussion in the coming months ahead. But for now, that is a wrap for this week's edition of Check 6. A special thanks to our podcast editor in London, Guy Ferniho. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Check 6 so you never miss an episode. If you found today's discussion helpful, consider leaving a rating or review. Better yet,

share this episode with a friend or colleague. That's all the time we have for now. Thanks for your time and join us again next week for another Check 6.