TrueValueMetrics ... Impact Accounting for the 21st Century

Date: 2025-08-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028650

ROLLS-ROYCE NEW RR ENGINE DEVELOPMENT Mentour Now!: Could THIS Revolutionize Aviation?! PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nuZjlDkaVA Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Every time I read stories about Rolls Royce it triggers memories of my engineering days at Cambridge and time spent in London in the 1960s. In the Cambridge University engineering lab, there was an early jet engine mounted on an accessible display stand. It was about 6 feet long and about 2 feet in diameter ...tiny compared to what is now commonplace! When I was in London, I created a small 'investment club' and some of the members were some young Cambridge engineers! One of them was working at Rolls Rpyce on the RB211 development program. This was around the time the development program hit a huge problem that required massive re-engineering of the engine and resulted in the bankruptcy of the Rolls Royce company and its subsequent reorgaization. It also had a major impact on Lockheed in the USA that was planning to use the new RB211 engines for the L1011 TriJet wide-body aircraft. After reorganization the RR company had a singular focus on the aero engine business and had great success, becoming one of the dominant companies in the industry. I have managed to stay reasonably up-to-date about the RR story ... in my view, one of the great engineering and business stories of all time! Peter Burgess
Could THIS Revolutionize Aviation?! Mentour Now! Jun 9, 2025 557K subscribers ... 239,924 views ... 10K likes Did Rolls-Royce just make a new move that could change the future of jet engines? After years of struggling, the company has announced they are re-entering the single-aisle aircraft market that it left over a decade ago. So, what’s changed and could this revolutionize aviation? Let’s find out. Editor’s Note: At timestamp 7:53, the correct unit should be “B” for billion, not million. We apologize for the oversight! - Mentour Team 00 - Intro 0:30 - Why did Rolls-Royce leave the Single-Aisle Market? 3:20 - What Is the Rolls-Royce Ultrafan Engine? 8:15 - Rolls-Royce Financial Recovery 10:55 - Which Planes Could Use the Ultrafan Engine? 17:30 - Can Rolls-Royce Compete? If you want to support the work I do on the channel, join my Patreon crew and get awesome perks and help me move the channel forward! 👉🏻 / mentourpilot 👉🏻 Visit https://www.virtual737course.com to learn how to fly a 737 like Petter in our virtual 737 SIM course Mor 20% off! ✈️ Our Connections: 👉🏻 Exclusive Mentour Merch: https://mentour-crew.creator-spring.com 👉🏻 Premium Mentour Artwork: https://electrify.art/mentour-pilot 👉🏻 Our other channel: / mentourpilot 👉🏻 Our Podcast: / @mentourpodcast 👉🏻 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/shop/mentourpilot 👉🏻 BOSE Aviation: https://boseaviation-emea.aero/headsets Social: 👉🏻 Facebook: / mentourpilot 👉🏻 Instagram: / mentour_pilot 👉🏻 Twitter: / mentourpilot 👉🏻 Discord server: / discord Below you will find the links to videos and sources used in this episode. SOURCES • Rolls-Royce \| Jon Wandless Chief Engineer ... • Rolls-Royce \| Andrew Dawkins on the Trent ... • Rolls-Royce \| UltraFan • Rolls-Royce \| UltraFan Test Programmes • Rolls-Royce \| Advance and Ultrafan™ CTi fa... • Pratt & Whitney GTF Advantage™ Engine • Rolls-Royce & Partners Finance (RRPF) and ... • Covid-19 - Aerospace in crisis: Engine mak... • Rolls-Royce \| Karriere bei Rolls-Royce in ... • Rolls-Royce \| Alan Newby on our Future Pro... • No survivors following Ethiopian Airlines ... • GE Aviation and the Ceramic Matrix Composi... • Rolls-Royce \| What makes the Pearl 15 engi... • Rolls-Royce \| Introducing the Pearl 10X • China Weighs Massive Airbus Planes Deal in... • Introducing the VIP Boeing 757-200 • 10 Year Anniversary SEA-KEF \| Icelandair • C40 Pilot: Scott Air Force Base • On a C-17 with the U.S. Air Force • Building the Future • We Are Builders • Scaled: A Year in Flight Test • What It Takes to Fly The $340 Million C-17... • Rolls-Royce: Supply chain issues expected ... • Challenger 604 Pro Line Fusion • Action: Saab 105 im Flug • Blended Wing Body: The shape of things to ... #Mentourpilot #pilot #aircraft Transcript 0:01 - Did Rolls-Royce just make a radical change in its strategy in the airliner engine market? The British engine-maker now seems to have moved past some worrying financial troubles and they recently made an announcement that could shake up the world of jet engines for modern single-aisle aircraft by rejoining a market that they effectively abandoned over a decade ago. And while breaking into this market won't be easy, Rolls-Royce seems to have picked a good time to try, because aircraft-makers, including some unexpected ones, could soon have a use for a modern jet engine of precisely this size. Now, Rolls-Royce have been through some ups and downs in the past few years. The 2010s were a quite difficult period for the company as they worked hard to try and sort out the problems haunting the 787 engines in particular. And even more recently, we've also seen them having 1:00 to tackle longevity issues, affecting their Trent XWB engines, fitted to the Airbus A350-1000. Now, Rolls-Royce's Trent 7000 engines for the Airbus A330 had a slightly smoother entry into service, thanks to the fact that they are nearly identical to the Trent 1000 engines for the Boeing 787. But even they also had some longevity issues, requiring more frequent maintenance than initially expected. Rolls-Royce is fixing all of this, but even before those stories broke, the company had announced an ambitious new engine project called the UltraFan, which is supposed to be the replacement for the Trent engine family, Rolls-Royce's decades old staple in the airliner world. Now, Rolls-Royce is testing out several technologies in this project, but in case you haven't seen it, the most noticeable feature of this first UltraFan prototype is that it is absolutely huge. 2:03 This monster has a fan disk that's 140 inches, or 3.56 meters in diameter. And that means that it's even larger than the engines for the new Boeing 777X, which in turn is larger in diameter than the fuselage of the Boeing 737 that I fly. Of course, there is a reason for this large diameter. As I've explained in the past, a modern turbofan engine can generate more power either by pushing back the same amount of air faster, or by pushing back more air at the same speed. And for reasons that I won't go into today, pushing back more air at the same speed is far more efficient, so that's where this huge fan comes in. Now, crucially, the Rolls-Royce UltraFan is equipped with a geared fan in the front, which takes all of this theory to another level. The geared design allows the fan blades to spin slower, 3:01 which both improves efficiency and allows engine-makers to greatly simplify the rest of the engine. Now, that's actually a little bit counterintuitive, because obviously that gear reduction system for the fan has to be quite heavy in order to be strong enough to handle all of that thrust. And that's actually the reason we haven't seen large geared turbofans until now. The technology in itself actually dates back many decades, but geared fans were initially only used for small military or corporate jets. So that's why Rolls-Royce's massive first UltraFan prototype was such a breakthrough. It proved that ,today, these gearboxes really can take the forces involved in even the largest widebody engines. And despite the weight of that massive fan gearbox, this design actually makes it possible to save weight overall, since slowing down the fan in the front also allows engine makers to speed up other sections 4:01 of the engine, like the compressor stages, just behind the fan, or the turbine stages at the very back of the engine. That in turn means that the compressor and the turbine can have fewer stages, which reduces complexity and weight. Plus, since the fan blades in this case will spin slower, that means that each individual blade also has less energy. So if one of them were to break off for any reason, the casing around the fan doesn't need to be as sturdy or heavy, which saves even more weight. All of that is why these engines can be lighter than conventional high bypass turbofans, even with the extra weight of that gearbox up the front. Again, I have made some videos in the past that go into this in much more detail. Most recently, I made a video about the Rolls-Royce UltraFan in particular explaining how that enormous demonstrator could become the basis for an engine for a potential Airbus A350neo, 5:01 which would then threaten the prospects of Boeing's 777X even before it enters service. But I've also mentioned that Rolls-Royce's decision to specialize on engines for such large airliners has in the past come back to haunt them. The last engine that Rolls-Royce designed for single-aisle airliners was the legendary RB-211, which entered service already back in the early 1970s with the widebody Lockheed L-1011. It was later also used in the single-aisle Boeing 757, along with widebodies like the 767 and even the mighty Boeing 747. So the RB-211 wasn't a case of Rolls-Royce catering only for single-aisle aircraft. That was just a happy coincidence and a successful one at that. Then in the 1980s, Rolls-Royce joined the International Aero Engines Joint Venture, making the V2500 engine. 6:01 Now, this was a single-aisle aircraft engine, which actually still powers many older Airbus A320 family jets, along with the McDonnell Douglas MD-90 and most recently, the Embraer C-390 cargo jet. But in 2011, Rolls-Royce then officially exited the single-aisle jet engine business by selling its 32.5 stake in the International Aero Engines Consortium to Pratt & Whitney. That deal was worth $1.5 billion and left Rolls-Royce focused squarely on the long-haul market, a decision that at the time seemed to make sense. But only a decade later, Rolls-Royce's long-haul focus suddenly didn't look quite as promising anymore. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, international long-haul passenger travel suffered incredibly to a much greater extent than the short-haul market did, whilst also taking much longer to recover. 7:01 And while those wide-bodies were grounded, so were also all of the Rolls-Royce engines under their wings. And with Rolls-Royce relying on power to the hour service contracts on those engines and those service revenues obviously plummeting since no one was flying, the company virtually burned through its cash, losing around 4 billion pounds in 2020 alone. When Tufan Erginbilgiç took over as CEO of the company in 2023, he famously even called the company a burning platform. But since then, Rolls-Royce have staged a remarkable recovery, thanks to both post-pandemic long-haul travel recovery and the company's own reorganization efforts. In 2023, they reported a record free cash flow of 1.285 billion pounds and an underlying operating profits of 1.59 billion. This resurgence has now given Rolls-Royce 8:00 the confidence and capital to keep funding their research and development projects. So in November of 2023, the company announced that they had run their UltraFan prototype at full power for the very first time at their test facility in Derby, UK. And this same resurgence also allowed Rolls-Royce to start exploring new markets, which brings us back to the narrowbody sector and the engine-maker's last decision. Now when we were researching this part, my researchers came across a page that seemed legit, it had all of the correct logos, a professional layout and so on, but something just seemed a little bit… off. And it's exactly in those types of circumstances that I'm so happy that we're using NordVPN, today's sponsor. Most people think VPNs are just for watching movies and sports abroad, but Nord's Threat Protection Pro has now become really essential for our work. 9:00 It immediately flagged this fake site before we had really any time to interact with it, and that's not just marketing talk. Nord is actually the only VPN with official certification from independent testers. And their Threat Protection Pro recently beat out several premium cybersecurity tools in a scam detection test. And that's not saying nothing. Scams are really becoming a huge problem, as I'm sure that you're aware. In the first three months of 2025, Nord blocked over 300 million scam attempts, that's 300 million real attempts to steal people's money and information. Now another great thing with Nord is just how easy it is to set up. All you need to do is click the shield icon in the app and it's done. You might also have to grant Nord some permissions in your settings, but you will get clear instructions on how to do so. So if you want to start getting protected today, then use this QR code or go to nordvpn.com/mentournow 10:02 to get four extra months free with their two-year plan. And remember, you're not risking anything by trying, since Nord always gives you a 30-day money back guarantee. Thank you Nord for sponsoring this video, now back to the UltraFan. The news about Roll-Royce's latest plans came from Guy Norris in Aviation Week, who revealed that the engine-maker is now in the process of finalizing the design of its second UltraFan demonstrator, and this one will be much smaller. It will produce a bit more than 30,000 pounds of thrust, which means that it will produce about the same thrust as other modern single-aisle engines, like the CFM LEAP or the Pratt & Whitney PW1000G, although it will likely actually be a little bit more powerful than both of those, which is worth remembering here. Anyway, at that size and thrust output, a production version of this new UltraFan could therefore be used 11:01 to power a potential replacement of the Airbus A320 or the Boeing 737 families. Now to be clear here, Rolls-Royce has always said that the UltraFan could be scaled both up or down to power either widebodies or single-aisle jets and everything in between. But by actually building a demonstrator engine, the company is now sending a clear message to the airline world. Alan Newby, Rolls-Royce's Director of Aerospace Technology and Future Programs, said that they're doing this to show to our customers that we're serious about it, to show to our suppliers that we're serious about it, and also to show our potential partners that we're serious about it. Now the timing of this development is really important. Rolls-Royce aims to start testing this second UltraFan prototype in 2028, which might seem far away, but the company will be doing this in parallel with the development of their larger UltraFan prototype, 12:02 which seems to still need some work. And that 2028 testing timeline actually sounds about right for an engine aimed to be fitted to a passenger aircraft, let's say in the second half of the 2030s. Remember CFM's RISE prototype was originally meant to begin testing in 2026, also for a potential next-generation single-aisle aircraft, so Rolls-Royce now seems to be squarely back in that game. By the way, all of this is a little bit ironic, because originally Rolls-Royce had been in talks with Boeing about making an UltraFan for Boeing's New Midsized Airplane or NMA, but they withdrew themselves from Boeing's NMA project because they thought that they wouldn't be ready in time. Boeing demanded a much quicker development timeline. This happened in February of 2019, just weeks before the second of the 737 MAX crashes, the aftermath of which led to the cancellation of the NMA, 13:00 and the two 737 MAX variants who are still not certified six years later. So it turns out Boeing wasn't in such a hurry after all. Anyway, for Rolls-Royce, building an UltraFan design for a single-aisle aircraft actually brings up some unique challenges. This engine will obviously keep the geared fan configuration, which Pratt & Whitney is already using in their own PW1000G engine, and it will also make use of advanced materials, like ceramic matrix composites or CMCs, which CFM uses in its LEAP engines. These materials allow jet engines to run hotter safely, and Rolls-Royce is already using them in later versions of their Trent engines. But one thing that Rolls-Royce still need to prove that they are capable of in order to shrink the engine down for single-aisle use is to miniaturize the overall design of the engine core. You see, like I mentioned earlier, 14:01 modern turbofans need to have a high bypass ratio, meaning that we want most of the air from the fan in the front to go around or bypass the engine core rather than going through it. This means that the core, which is basically the guts of the engine, needs to be as small in diameter and as lightweight as possible while still being able to support that high bypass ratio. That might sound easy enough, but it's actually not that straightforward. Companies like Pratt & Whitney and more recently, General Electric have been working with NASA in the HyTEC project, specifically to make progress in this very complicated process. Fortunately for Rolls-Royce though, despite their focus on wide-body airliners during all of these years, they are definitely not starting from zero when it comes to modern smaller jet engines. They have made engines for many other applications in the meantime, including helicopters, 15:00 turboprops and, most importantly, for corporate jets. One of its newest jet engines in general is called the Pearl family, and those are made specifically for corporate jets. This group of engines is an evolution of older designs, one of which will actually power the next version of the B-52 bomber. But the latest versions, like the Pearl 10X, built for Dassault's Falcon 10X, already made use of advanced high-temperature materials and other core technologies, which is exactly what Rolls-Royce now will need to bring together with the rest of their work on the UltraFan in order to make that smaller variant of reality. So all of this means that Rolls-Royce should have all of the right ingredients to build this smaller UltraFan engine without any major hiccups. And by the time it is fired up for the first time in 2028, Rolls-Royce will most likely have learned even more from the development of its Pearl engines and the larger UltraFan prototype. 16:01 Now hopefully, by then we will also have learned the answer to the question that I'm sure a lot of you are asking right now. Who will actually use this engine and for what? Now I'm not going to go into a deep dive into Boeing's recent problems, but it's safe to say that they're probably not in a financial position to launch a new airliner right now, but of course that could easily change within two or three years and for Boeing's sake, I really hope so. As for Airbus, they're not really in a hurry to develop anything new either. With no competition from Boeing, the European aircraft-maker seems happy to just keep producing Airbus A320s and A321s as fast as they possibly can, because they have enough of a backlog to keep making them for another decade or so. And they also have the smaller Airbus A220 that still hasn't reached a satisfactory production rate yet. Now that still leaves companies like Embraer, which could surprise everyone 17:01 and develop something completely new, as I've talked about before, if they can get the right kind of financial backing, which I also hope for. But if Rolls-Royce plays its cards right and choose to size their production UltraFan engine the right way, there might be one or two other uses for it as well. Firstly, Boeing will ultimately want its next new aircraft to replace not just the 737, but also the 757. Because right now, Boeing has nothing to offer between the 737 MAX 10 and the 787-8. So it would be reasonable to expect a Boeing 757 replacement to be able to use the same engines as the 737 replacement, since the Airbus A321neo uses the same engine as the Airbus A320neo, and it is about the same size as the 757-200. Of course, the 757 had more power, but that was mainly because it needed it 18:00 due to its higher empty weight and requirement for better performance at challenging conditions, but a slightly more powerful engine than what's currently on the market could still fit in quite snugly with a slightly larger new Boeing. Now there is also another entity out there that would surely be interested in a new engine the same size as the 757's engine, and that's the US Air Force. They still have a handful of 757's around, with Pratt & Whitney's PW2000 engines, but the same engines, with the military designation F117, also powers the Boeing C-17 cargo plane. Now the last C-17 was delivered just a decade ago, so the fleet likely won't need engine upgrades for some time yet, but as Jon Ostrower explains in The Air Current, the Air Force would like to have a future option for an engine upgrade. And that's not the only reason why the US Air Force might be interested here. 19:01 They are also currently spending $235 million on a really futuristic-looking design from a company called JetZero for a blended wing-body concept. And it seems like the Air Force doesn't just see this as a paper project either. They have actually been interested in blended wing-body designs for quite some time, and JetZero now has partnered up with defense contractor Northrop Grumman, as well as Scaled Composites, who are famous for designing and actually building innovative new aircraft. As Ostrower explains, size-wise, JetZero's design could then also be used to develop into a 250-seater airliner, which means that it would need an engine similar in power to that of the 757 and the C-17. You see what I'm getting at? Now JetZero aims to fly a full-scale proof of concept demonstrator of this design by 2027, and that one-off aircraft will then use 20:01 the same Pratt & Whitney PW2040 engines that powers the C-17, producing around 43,000 pounds of thrusts. But JetZero and its partners expect that when the production version enters service, probably in the mid-2030s, it will then also have access to a newer and better engine, which brings us back to Rolls-Royce and their work on the UltraFan. Now obviously, when Airbus, Boeing, Embraer or someone else launches a new airliner, the size of the 737 or something even bigger, it won't just be Rolls-Royce who will jump at the opportunity to make engines for it. And in that sense, the British engine-maker is kind of the outsider here, since they have been out of the single-aisle market for so long. We all know about the manufacturing duopoly that we have these days. But when it comes to engines for single-aisle aircraft, we basically also have an engine duopoly, Pratt & Whitney and CFM, 21:00 the latter being a 50-50 venture between General Electric and Safran. Now again, Rolls-Royce have plenty of experience with big and small engines, and I'm sure that they can combine them to build a fantastic single-aisle engine. But when they do, actually producing such an engine is then going to be a different type of challenge. You see the problem here is that aircraft like the 737 or the Airbus A320 are made in a much higher volume than bigger wide-body jets are. Around two thirds of the world's airliners are narrow bodies, so the 737s and Airbus A320s collectively need literally twice as many engines as the widebodies do. And that's not all. single-aisle aircraft also fly more cycles than widebodies, which is why we pilots who fly the 737s and Airbus A320s generally do much more takeoffs and landings than our colleagues do in the wide-bodies. But this also means that single-aisle aircraft engines live harder lives, since they spend more time 22:01 at higher power settings during takeoff and climbs. So to recap, engine-makers catering to this market need higher rates of production, and they need to make sure that their engines are very reliable and durable for high-cycle use. And as a new returnee to the single-aisle aircraft engine world, Rolls-Royce will therefore need to convince aircraft manufacturers, the airlines and their suppliers that they can reliably do all of that and do it well. There is also a financial element here. Rolls-Royce may have recovered from the dark days of the pandemic, but a new engine project like this will be expensive and it will take years before it starts paying off. The total cost is estimated to be around $3.9 billion, so the engine maker is reportedly now lobbying the UK government for some funding assistance, since a massive project like this could create a lot of jobs in the country. 23:01 Now I know that I'm oversimplifying all of this a bit. It is safe to assume that the competition between engine makers will be extremely fierce whenever we learn the details of the next aircraft from Boeing or Airbus or someone else. And the reason that I mentioned the JetZero project is that someone like Rolls-Royce could instead focus on a more mid-size engine for a project like that plus the future prospect of a C-17 re-engine program, which would, of course, involve smaller production volumes if production capacity would become a problem. Or the company could decide to just make the best of this opportunity and hit the ground running, going for the heart of the market, the 737 and the Airbus A320 replacements whenever they come. But what do you think? What aircrafts do you think the Rolls-Royce UltraFan will power first? Can they disrupt the LEAP-GTF duopoly or will they instead try for something bigger, like a 757 or a blended wing-body? 24:02 Let me know in the comments below and don't forget to like, subscribe and hit that notification bell for even more deep dives into aviation's biggest stories. As you can see in our credits, we are now a big team working on the Mentour Group and that has been made possible partially by the support of our fantastic Patreon crew. Now if you want to take more direct part in our productions and also to get to see our next episodes before everyone else, maybe even today, then scan this QR code or go to patreon.com/join/mentourpilot. You can also support us by using your special deal from our sponsor in the link here below. Have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time. Bye bye!

SITE COUNT