Thomas Edison was famously fond of failures, using them as guideposts to new solutions. But the GE founder wasn’t the only person in the company espousing this lemons-to-lemonade philosophy. Take Sanford Moss, a bright engineer from Cornell University who joined the company in 1904 and proceeded to develop one of the first gas turbines. Problem was, the machine didn’t work. Undeterred, Moss shrunk his design and built a turbosupercharger, a device that squeezed the air entering an aircraft engine and allowed planes to retain power at high altitudes.

The first plane using the machine took off for the first time on July 12, 1919, eventually reaching a record speed of 137 mph at 18,400 feet, compared with 90 mph without a supercharger. Planes equipped with Moss’ design later went on to set several world altitude records.

The success earned Moss a spot in the National Aviation Hall of Fame and launched GE’s aviation business, which is celebrating its centenary this week on the eve of the inaugural flight. GE Aviation is now a $30 billion business — based on 2018 revenues — making engines for supersonic military jets as well as the world’s largest and most powerful commercial jet engines. According to company statistics, every two seconds an aircraft powered by GE technology takes off somewhere in the world. That translates to more than 2,200 planes aloft at any given moment.

And the company is hardly standing still. GE Aviation is developing a jet engine for the next-generation civilian supersonic jet and thinking about creating engines for hypersonic planes that zoom faster than 3,500 miles per hour, or Mach 5. At that clip, which is about seven times the typical speeds commercial planes travel at today, passengers would be able to travel from New York to Sydney in less than 3 hours.

When do we get to fly on a jet like that? “We’re still decades from reaching the point where hypersonic air travel is practical,” says Narendra Joshi, advanced technology leader at GE Research, who has been exploring hypersonic air travel. “But it’s technical advances like ceramic matrix composites and others within GE’s technology portfolio that have us believing it’s not a question of if, but when it will happen.”

We recently talked to Joshi about his work. Here’s an edited version of our conversation, which also appeared on LinkedIn.

Supersonic passenger jets like the Aerion AS2 are getting ready for takeoff. Hypersonic planes are next in line. Top and above images credit: Aerion.

GE Reports: Tell us about your work.

Narendra Joshi: My job is to imagine what the future could be 100 years from now and to then make it possible. Today, I am leading a multidisciplinary team at GE’s Research Lab to develop the fundamental technologies that will enable not only robust supersonic commercial air travel but someday also allow us to travel at hypersonic speeds.

GER: What are some of these technologies?

NJ: The pursuit of a hypersonic age in aviation really comes down to five keys: high-temperature materials, heat management technologies, engine design, advanced vehicle controls and technologies controlling emissions.

GER: Let’s start with materials.

NJ: For jet engine makers, we’ve been addressing the challenge of developing high-temperature materials to withstand the volcanic-like temperatures inside the engine for decades. Take ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). Parts from CMCs, which are already inside jet engines like the CFM LEAP engine, are just a third of the weight of their comparable metal components but just as durable as metal. They are able to handle temperatures several hundred degrees hotter than the most advanced superalloys. This has translated into a 1.5% increase in efficiency for our new engine platforms with these components, which equates to billions of dollars of fuel cost savings for the airline industry.

But with hypersonic travel, that challenge exists for materials on the outside of the plane as well. When you’re traveling at Mach 5, the air around the plane will heat up in excess of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. It will cause the plane to glow red on the outside. We believe continued advances in new materials like CMCs will help us address this issue.

GER: How do you tame this heat?

NJ: In today’s jet engines, we address the hotter, harsher operating environments with a multipronged approach of higher temperature materials combined with advanced cooling systems and thermal barrier coatings for parts to handle and manage the heat. At GE Research, we’re now combining these areas of expertise with our experience in 3D printing and design to develop whole new designs and architectures in thermal management that can support high temperatures inside the engine and outside the hypersonic plane.

GER: What are the engines going to look like?

NJ: They will be different from jet engines. For nearly five years, GE has been developing a new combustion technology called rotating detonation combustion (RDC) that, along with the conventional jet engine, is one of the few promising approaches being explored to deliver enough thrust to travel at hypersonic speeds.

GER: OK, so we will have cool new planes and engines. What else will change?

NJ: I can’t even begin to imagine what steering a plane would be like at hypersonic speeds. It will require new advances in the actuation and controls systems of planes to ensure safe travel. Something that works at the low speeds of takeoff and high speeds at cruise. For this challenge, we are exploring advanced applications that involve synthetic jets and cold plasma that could provide solutions.

GER: What the impact on the environment?

NJ: GE researchers already have accumulated decades of experience developing technologies to reduce noise and pollutants to make aircraft engines quieter and less polluting. We have worked on programs with partners like NASA and the FAA to address this challenge with supersonic flight. We have deep expertise in computational fluid dynamics, acoustics and combustion that we can apply to the challenges hypersonic travel will present.

A hundred years from now, it’s hard to fathom just how different the world will be. But I bet hypersonic air travel will be as commonplace as the planes that fly today. The only difference is that travel won’t just be confined to Earth’s atmosphere. Our reach will be much greater.

Swiss scientists are helping harness the excess heat generated by subway systems into usable energy, researchers in Washington are testing out technology for proto-telepathic communication, and a set of smart glasses under development at Stanford might work way better than progressive lenses for folks with age-related visual impairment. Get a glimpse of a fascinating future in this week’s coolest scientific discoveries.

A Lot Of Hot Air

“Our research shows that fitting the heat-recovery system along 50–60% of the planned route — or 60,000 square meters of tunnel surface area — would cover the heating needs of 1,500 standard 80m2 apartments,” says researcher Margaux Peltier. Illustration credit: LMS / 2019 EPFL.

What is it? As residents, visitors, and Marilyn Monroe all know, one of those truly magical New York experiences is the warm blasts of dubious-smelling air you encounter blowing up through subway grates while you walk down a busy city sidewalk. Now researchers at the Soil Mechanics Laboratory of Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have taken a big step toward harnessing the heat trapped in rail tunnels for a more useful purpose: energy.

Why does it matter? That subterranean heat comes from the braking and acceleration of trains as well as from air-conditioning and the ground itself. Capturing it with a heat-recovery system could help cities reduce their CO2 emissions, explained Margaux Peltier, who with her colleagues calculated the potential benefits for a planned metro tunnel in Lausanne: “Our research shows that fitting the heat-recovery system along 50–60% of the planned route — or 60,000 square meters of tunnel surface area — would cover the heating needs of 1,500 standard 80m2 apartments…Switching from gas-fired heating would cut the city’s CO2 emissions by two million tons per year.” (The calculations are described further in Applied Thermal Engineering.)

How does it work? The first step toward building such a system was gaining the ability to calculate just how much heat we’re talking about — that’s the breakthrough made by the Swiss scientists — which paves the way for “energy tunnels,” according to a release from EPFL. Such systems, low-cost and energy-efficient, would work similarly to a refrigerator, using plastic tubes with a liquid in them that could absorb the tunnels’ excess heat and move it to where it’s needed.

Senders’ Game

Top: Allen School graduate student Linxing Preston Jiang sets up Savannah Cassis, a UW undergraduate in psychology, as the first Sender. Above: Heather Wessel, a recent UW graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, is a Sender for this experiment. She sees “Yes” and “No” on either side of the screen. Beneath the “Yes” option, an LED flashes 17 times per second. Beneath the “No” option, an LED flashes 15 times a second. Captions credit: University of Washington. Images credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington.

What is it? A research team at the University of Washington has brought telepathic communication one step closer to reality with a program called BrainNet, which they describe as “the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving.” As a demonstration, they had three people collaborate on playing a Tetris-like game, using only their minds to communicate.

Why does it matter? The researchers hope that brain-to-brain communication could lead to more fruitful interpersonal collaboration in general — for instance, by teams of folks working together to solve tough problems. But, warns Rajesh Rao, the corresponding author of a new paper in Nature, “this is just a baby step. Our equipment is still expensive and very bulky and the task is a game. We’re in the ‘Kitty Hawk’ days of brain interface technologies: We’re just getting off the ground.”

How does it work? Looking at the same Tetris-like computer game — but in different rooms, with no way to communicate — two people were designated “Senders” and one person was the “Receiver.” The Senders could see a block at the top of the screen, and a line it had to fit into at the bottom. The Receiver could see only the block, and had to rely on the Senders to explain how to move it. The Senders wore electroencephalography caps that picked up brain activity, and the Receiver wore a “wand” that stimulated neurons associated with visual signals: The Receiver would “see” bright flashes, dictated by the brain waves of the Sender, that indicated where and how to move the block. That’s the short version, anyway — read the whole play-by-play here.

Down To The Nanowire

A U-shaped nanowire pierces the membrane of a neuron. Caption and image courtesy of The Lieber Research Group.

What is it? Nine years ago, Harvard professor Charles M. Lieber developed the first nanotechnology devices that could record electrical activity inside a live cell. Now Lieber and colleagues have devised a way to “makes thousands of these devices at once, creating a nanoscale army that could speed efforts to find out what’s happening inside our cells,” according to the Harvard Gazette.

Why does it matter? Advanced technologies like the brain-to-brain interface described about, and brain-to-machine interfaces that could be developed to treat conditions like Parkinson’s, will require scientists to have a nano-level view of what’s going on inside our cells. As the Gazette puts it, the field previously faced a Goldilocks conundrum: Cellular recording devices that are too large will kill cells, while too-small devices pick up too much noise and not enough useful information. The approach Lieber developed in 2010 was able to pierce cell membranes and transmit accurate data without killing the cell, but to build that device was a painstaking process that took weeks.

How does it work? Lieber’s new nanowires, described in Nature Nanotechnology, are fabricated en masse to look like cooked spaghetti. (Very tiny spaghetti, anyway.) To separate the wires, Lieber and team pull them across a silicon surface carved with U-shaped trenches, which help untangle and capture the individual nanowires. So far, the new mass-produced transistors have been successfully used to record data from cardiac and neural cells.

A Clear Line Of Sight

Stanford engineers are testing a pair of smart glasses that can automatically focus on whatever you’re looking at. Caption credit: Stanford News. Image credit: Robert Konrad.

What is it? Engineers at Stanford have developed autofocals: basically, smart glasses that follow the movement of your eyes and focus wherever you’re looking.

Why does it matter? Most middle- and older-aged people experience visual impairment related to presbyopia, when the lens of the eye loses elasticity and focusing becomes more difficult — it’s typically treated by progressive lenses. But traditional progressive glasses require you to move your head toward whatever you’re looking at in order to focus your eyes; so if you’re trying to look in the side mirror while driving, for instance, that means turning your head away from the road. “More than a billion people have presbyopia and we’ve created a pair of autofocal lenses that might one day correct their vision far more effectively than traditional glasses,” said Gordon Wetzstein, a Stanford electrical engineer, and the co-author of a paper on autofocals in Science Advances.

How does it work? The autofocals rely on a mixture of technologies, not all of which were developed by the Stanford team; they developed the software that ties the whole thing together. Their prototype pairs fluid-filled lenses “that bulge and thin as the field of vision changes,” according to Stanford, with eye-tracking technology that registers where the wearer is looking and calculates the distance in between. The prototype is still a bit chunky; the next step will be to streamline it.

Icing, Off The Cake

The team created tiny raised ringlets on their surface that act kind of like bowls, causing the droplets to splash upward rather than flow outward on the surface. GIF credit: Henri-Louis Girard, Dan Soto, and Kripa Varanas.

What is it? Engineers at MIT have designed a special surface that repels drops of water, helping the surface stay dry or avoid icing by sending droplets bouncing off.

Why does it matter? Let us count the ways, or better yet — let MIT, which sums up the potential of water-repellant tech in a news release: “keeping ice from building up on an airplane wing or a wind turbine blade, or preventing heat loss from a surface during rainfall, or preventing salt buildup on surfaces exposed to ocean spray.”

How does it work? As explained in a paper in ACS Nano, the researchers found that the key was not just getting water off a surface as quickly as possible — for instance, before it ices — but also to minimize the amount of area onto which a droplet of water can spread before bouncing off. To achieve both these aims, they created tiny raised ringlets on their surface that act kind of like bowls, causing the droplets to splash upward rather than flow outward on the surface. Mechanical engineering professor Kripa Varanasi said, “The idea of reducing contact area by forming ‘waterbowls’ has far greater effect on reducing the overall interaction than by reducing contact time alone.”

Energy will be in the air in Denver this week when 2,000 of the nation’s brightest science and engineering minds, high-powered executives and politicians descend on the city to take on America’s most urgent energy problems. A key part of their agenda: harnessing the power of public-private collaboration to drive innovation.

This year’s ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit will showcase nearly 300 early-stage technologies seeking to improve the grid, boost energy storage, scale carbon sequestration and solve other critical challenges facing the energy sector.

The summit is the perfect place for companies and entrepreneurs focused on creating the future of the energy industry. That’s because historically, ARPA-E, the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, has been looking for and supporting the best ideas in the field and helping them hatch into viable products.

Representatives from GE Research will be on the ground, as well. GE has worked closely with government agencies for decades, partnering on monumental projects like the first U.S. jet engine or the moon landing, for example. Climate change and the power sector’s shift to renewable energy present a similarly pivotal moment for humanity. Here are recent examples of what can happen when the public and private sector start working together:

Breaker, Breaker

Top image: An high-voltage DC (HVDC) converter station. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy. Above: A worker installing an HVDC line. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Fast-acting circuit breakers will be essential to an upgraded power grid that can efficiently transmit large amounts renewable energy.

Why does it matter? One of the biggest hurdles to increasing the share of renewable power in the energy mix involves shipping it efficiently over long distances, say, from the windy empty prairies of the Great Plains to large cities. A leading solution involves a combination of high- and medium-voltage direct current (DC) transmission lines. But these DC power grids need fast circuit breakers that can shut electricity off in case of a problem, before it can spread and cause an outage. These breakers exist, but GE is working on making them better.

Who is funding it? ARPA-E recently awarded a team of GE engineers $5.8 million to develop a superfast medium-voltage DC breaker.

Deep Breathing

A prototype of a 3D printed heat exchanger designed by GE researchers Dan Erno and Bill Gerstler at GE Research in Niskayuna, NY. Image credit: GE Research.

What is it? GE researchers have designed a heat exchanger— an essential component of the cooling system of a power turbine — that mimics human lungs.

Why does it matter? The steam turbine was invented 135 years ago, but it’s still the technology used in most power plants. These plants could be more efficient if they operated at a higher temperature, but metals currently being used in them can only withstand temperature up to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Enter an advanced nickel superalloy GE is using in jet engines parts. Engineers at GE Research are using additive technology — commonly known as 3D printing — to build a heat exchanger designed to mimic the human lung, which plays an important role in regulating the body’s temperature to 98 degrees. The technology would allow plants to operate at greater than 1,650 degrees F.

Who is funding it? In April, ARPA-E awarded GE a $2.5 million, 2.5-year grant to develop a 50-kilowatt demonstration heat exchanger using the new design.

Take A Load Off

Renewables are growing fast in the U.S., and they generated more power than coal for the country’s grid for the first time ever earlier this year. But utilities often struggle to make the most out of the elements. Image credit: GE Reports.

What is it?Software that could one day help utilities predict the amount of electricity generated by intermittent renewable resources like wind and sun, and maximize the dispatch of this carbon-free power to consumers.

Why does it matter? Renewables are growing fast in the U.S., and they generated more power than coal for the country’s grid for the first time ever earlier this year. But utilities often struggle to make the most out of the elements: The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine, and the grid’s consumption — or load curve — is constantly changing. This software could smooth the U.S. grid’s transition into the renewables-rich era by aggregating thousands of customer load curves in real time and matching them with production projections. “We can’t control the weather, but our software will help us control the electricity it generates,” says GE electrical engineer Naresh Acharya.

Who is funding it? In 2015, ARPA-E gave $3.9 million in funding to GE Research’s headquarters in Niskayuna, New York, for the project, which is one of 12 in the Network Optimized Distributed Energy Systems (NODES) Program.

Quick Copies

Molecular biologist John Nelson (in a blue coat) and his team at GE Research. Image credit: GE Research.

What is it? The collaboration between GE scientists and the government extends beyond energy. DNA vaccines that could allow scientists to develop and mass-produce vaccines in just hours. These vaccines use bits of genetic material to help the immune system flag and destroy a pathogen.

Why does it matter? Conventional methods of making vaccines, which rely on inactive viruses bred in animal cell cultures, can take months. That won’t help in the event of a bioweapon attack, for example. So scientists are working on DNA vaccines that they can create much more quickly using rapid genetic sequencing technology. John Nelson, a GE molecular biologist, has been working on a way to increase the amount of DNA in a sample synthetically so that scientists can run multiple tests on one sample and pick the right one. His work copying the DNA inside cells has resulted in a sample so dense, it is no longer a liquid but instead more like Silly Putty.

Who is funding it? Last year the Department of Defense awarded GE Global Research a $4.7 million grant to work on creating faster DNA samples.

Late last January, Amanda Berta got up at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m., threw on her sweats, gobbled down four eggs and a chocolate protein shake, and dashed out into the dark, frigid Chicago streets. As the rest of the city braced itself for bone-rattling cold that smashed past records, Berta was intent on getting in a 90-minute workout at her CrossFit studio nearby. She drilled down on burpees, kettlebell swings, handstand pushups and acceleration conditioning before heading to her engineering job at GE Renewable Energy.

Arriving at her office, she put in a full day of work creating digital dashboards for customers and GE Renewable Energy employees to use data that helps with decisions ranging from capital expenditures to potential costs for developing new turbines. Then she spent the evening practicing for two hours with her rugby team. On days when there’s no practice, Berta doubles up on punishing workouts. She’s in bed early, by 9 p.m., to repeat the grueling routine tomorrow.

Nothing, not even a polar vortex, will get in the way of this 23-year-old. She’s after redemption. Since getting cut from the U.S. women’s rugby team in December, Berta’s been determined to prove her detractors wrong and reclaim the chance to compete in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. It’s a goal so all-consuming that in its pursuit, she once came close to sacrificing her other dream: becoming an engineer.

Anyone competing at an Olympic level must be talented, fiercely competitive and able to fight endless fatigue. However, the ones who usually stand out have something extra, primarily the willingness to adapt to unexpected turns — oftentimes disappointments — that arise along the way. The true measure of an athlete isn’t so much what you do with your victories, but whether you have the grit and determination to transform losses into opportunity. Just ask New England Patriots quarterback and six-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady.

Berta has that kind of mettle in spades. An elite soccer player from the New York City suburbs, she played as a walk-on with the Pennsylvania State University women’s team until getting cut her junior year. Though she was not up to par with her teammates on this NCAA championship team, her coaches were impressed enough with her speed and agility to encourage her to give rugby a try. Playing a contact sport was an adjustment for the petite Berta. During her first practice, she had to tackle Azniv Nalbandian, a 210-pound U.S. national team player who won Big Ten Forward of the Year in 2017. “It was scary,” she said, as she recalls feeling pretty beat-up after the first week. “But the girls were awesome, so I continued to play.”

Above: A former elite soccer player, Berta (top row, second from the right) is vying to get on the U.S. women’s rugby team for a chance to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. She’s also an engineer at GE Renewable Energy. Image credit: Amanda Berta. Top image: “I’ve mostly learned how different people’s strengths can offset one another,” Berta says. “I don’t work the same as my colleagues do, but we need that diversity to be strong, just as everyone has different body types and different strengths in rugby. Being on a rugby team is almost a direct translation.”  Image credit: GE Reports.

In the meantime, she completed her degree in energy engineering. Ever since she was a little girl, Berta had dreamed of becoming a “builder.” As someone who devoured every TED Talk she could find on the environment, she was particularly intrigued with alternative fuel sources and the mechanics of renewable energy. “I am basically a hippy who’s good at math,” she quips.  Upon graduation in 2017, Berta earned a spot in GE’s Renewable Energy Development Program. The program offered the opportunity to receive hands-on training by rotating through jobs at sites in Florida, Oregon and Illinois. Thrilled at the prospect of learning about wind energy, Berta stopped playing competitive team sports to focus on engineering instead.

That is until rugby called once more. In July 2017, Berta auditioned — and was selected — for an NBC reality series called “Next Olympic Hopeful,” where Olympic coaches groom elite athletes for obscure sports like kayaking, bobsled or … rugby. Using her vacation time to appear on the program, Berta narrowly missed winning the competition outright, but still received invitations to several U.S. women’s rugby training camps. There, she played well enough to hear the sentence of every athlete’s dreams. “I think I can turn you into an Olympic player,” one U.S. women’s team coach told her. “Come and train with us at our facility.”

There was one catch: Berta’s engineering career at GE. Unable to see how to keep her position and spend four months at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California, she asked for a leave of absence. However, her supervisors had other plans. Impressed with this young employee’s passion and determination, program manager Ashley Gerbode joined forces with supervisor Sheri Hickok to find Berta another opportunity. GE was just launching its Digital League initiative, which included short-term assignments for employees interested in opportunities in digital technology, and they thought Berta was a perfect fit. “Everyone involved was inspired by Amanda’s story,” says Hickok, who oversees global product development at GE Renewable Energy. “We believed in her potential at GE, and together we helped find a role where Amanda could have a flexible work arrangement.” Berta landed a spot that would allow her to work remotely from the training center in California. The arrangement meant Berta could train for nine hours a day with her team, reserving early mornings and nights to focus on GE’s digital future. During breaks, she would respond to emails and calls. “I couldn’t have asked for a better situation,” she says.

Berta stays on top of her game, on the field and off. Image credit: Amanda Berta.

However, no situation in sports is entirely secure. In the case of Olympic rugby, every national team must compete to qualify weeks before opening ceremonies, which means coaches constantly rejigger their rosters for the best chance of making it to the games. During the last round of reconfiguring the team, Berta did not receive an invitation to return for 2019. “Imagine spending 24/7 with your friends playing a sport you love,” says Berta. “It was tough to leave them.”

Here is where Berta’s champion mentality kicked in. Rather than sulking, she began planning her comeback immediately. She moved to Chicago to work full-time for the Digital League division. She also found a club team that’s run by one of her former U.S. coaches. Using tips for improvement from her U.S. team coaches as a guideline, she designed a fitness routine, and adheres to it religiously. Given her winning performance at the nation’s largest invitational, HSBC USA Sevens in Las Vegas this month — she can return to the U.S. team in time to prepare for the Tokyo games.

That’s the same kind of endurance Berta channels into her work at GE. “I’ve mostly learned how different people’s strengths can offset one another. I don’t work the same as my colleagues do, but we need that diversity to be strong,” she observes, “just as everyone has different body types and different strengths in rugby. Being on a rugby team is almost a direct translation.”

Most importantly, Berta has gained life wisdom that often eludes people twice her age. “Things can change at any time,” she says. “What seems like the end of the world might be the beginning of a new one.”

Things can change at any time,” says Berta. “What seems like the end of the world might be the beginning of a new one.” Image credit: ©20xx Craig Houtz.

When David Joyce, GE Aviation president and CEO, unveiled his company’s latest jet engine at the Paris Air Show last month, he called it “the biggest, most advanced wide-body engine in the world.” He wasn’t kidding. Looming over him was the engine’s massive front fan spanning 11 feet in diameter.

GE engineers designed the engine, called the GE9X, to power Boeing’s latest 777X jets. And while the machine is brand-new, it is also a giant standing on the shoulders of, well, giants — specifically engines like the GE90, the world’s most powerful jet engine, and the GEnx, developed for Boeing’s popular 787 Dreamliner jets and the latest 747-8 aircraft.

Now these engines will have a family reunion. The Gulf airline Qatar Airways announced Tuesday that it had picked the GEnx engine to power 30 new twin-engine 787-9 Dreamliner jets and signed a long-term service agreement covering the maintenance, repair and overhaul of the engines. Qatar Airways also agreed to a long-term service agreement for the GE9X engines it has on order to power 60 777X jets. “Qatar Airways is one of the fastest-growing airlines in the world, and GE Aviation is proud to collaborate with Qatar Airways and play a significant role in their growth,” Joyce said. “Today’s signing will increase Qatar’s GEnx-powered B787 fleet to 60 aircraft and ensure the airline’s GEnx and GE9X engines receive the highest level of maintenance and support.”

Top and above: A pair of GEnx-2B engines powering a Qatar Airways Boeing 747-8 freighter. Images credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

Commenting on the deal, Ohio Senator Rob Portman said “GE’s selection is a testament to its commitment to excellence, investment in the best technology and most importantly the high quality of its workforce. This program is critical to maintaining America’s technological edge, and I am pleased that this contract will benefit GE and my home town of  Cincinnati.” Portman said that “this project will lead to increased investment in the region, which will help spur further economic growth, job creation and innovation, while enhancing Ohio’s reputation as a national leader in the aerospace industry.”

GE Aviation has sold more than 2,500 GEnx engines since its launched 15 years ago, making it the fastest-selling high-thrust GE engine in history. Just last month in Paris, Korean Air and Air Lease Corporation ordered a combined total of 30 GEnx-powered Dreamliners. And in May, Air New Zealand said it would power its new fleet of eight Boeing 787-10s, the longest version of the Dreamliner, with GEnx engines. That deal includes an option to boost the order to 20 jets. “This is a hugely important decision for our airline,” said Christopher Luxon, Air New Zealand CEO, in a press release. “With the 787-10 offering almost 15% more space for customers and cargo than the 787-9, this investment creates the platform for our future strategic direction and opens up new opportunities to grow.”

GE Aviation has received orders for more than 700 GE9X engines. That engine uses the fourth generation of carbon-fiber composite fan blades originally developed for the GE90. It holds parts made from the latest materials like light and heat-resistant ceramic matrix composites, and components made by advanced manufacturing technologies like 3D printing.

A Qatar Airways Boeing 777 jet powered by a pair of GE90 engines. Qatar Airway will power it new fleet of 777X jet s with GE Aviation’s latest engine, the GE9X. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

When Frank Whittle’s seaplane landed at LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal in New York City in June 1942, the pioneering jet engine designer found himself in a country that prided itself on its technological prowess. And yet, with World War II in full swing, the American jet engines were embarrassingly far behind the British, who themselves had fallen behind their German foes.

Walking through Pan Am’s new art deco terminal, Whittle passed beneath a recently completed mural depicting three decades of advances in human flight, hoping his own secret mission to the U.S. would lead to the next panel added to that mural. The 35-year-old inventor, who had inadvertently played a role in helping the Nazis get the lead in the critical turbojet technology, had come to the U.S. to turn that situation around.

The earliest efforts to produce a working jet engine make up a complicated tale of hubris, missed opportunities and — especially in the case of Whittle — a dogged determination to prove that his turbojet engine design could transform both air travel and aerial combat. It was the pursuit of that final goal that led the Royal Air Force to send him to the U.S. to team up with engineers at GE.

As it turned out, Whittle’s outsize confidence would be justified to the last detail. The partnership resulted in the first American jet engine and also energized GE’s aviation division, which is at the Paris Air Show this week celebrating 100 years in business. According to company statistics, every two seconds an aircraft powered by its technology takes off somewhere in the world. That translates to more than 2,200 planes aloft at any given moment, each carrying as many as 500 passengers.

The partnership between GE and Whittle resulted in the first American jet engine and also energized GE’s aviation division, which is at the Paris Air Show this week celebrating 100 years in business. Top and above images credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

Today most of us take long-haul air travel for granted, but the road to get there was by no means easy. Whittle first hit on the idea for a turbocharged jet engine in 1928, and he showed his plans to his superiors at the British Air Ministry in 1929. The engine’s design was wildly innovative, sucking in air that it then compressed, heated and — as the gas rapidly expanded — shot out the back of the engine at great speed, pushing the plane forward. Unfortunately, as with many breakthroughs, Whittle’s innovation struck his superiors as fanciful, a dream that was too good to be true. Acting on the advice of a single consultant, the Air Ministry rejected the design as impractical, leaving Whittle to take out an ordinary patent.

That patent, filed in January 1930, was made public in April 1931. The German Embassy immediately bought a copy and within four months had filed a version of its own at the Berlin patent office, according to records obtained by the inventor’s son, Ian Whittle. “People who wonder how the technology spread so quickly to Germany just have to understand what happens when patents are taken out,” says the younger Whittle. “The British Air Ministry was sufficiently sloppy not to put a cloak of secrecy on it, because they were convinced the turbojet was worthless as an idea.”

The Germans weren’t the only ones to spot what the British had missed. Engineers in both Sweden and Switzerland scooped up Whittle’s idea and soon built the world’s most advanced prototypes. Fortunately for the future Allied war effort, in 1936 a privately funded team in Britain seized on Whittle’s design and began building prototypes of their own.

A Le Pere biplane with a GE supercharger after making a record altitude flight. Moss is second from the left. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

Whittle’s assistance to GE would prove a critical turning point in the technology’s development, and it was also essential to the American effort to regain a leading role in aircraft engine design. In 1941, General Henry “Hap” Arnold witnessed a short flight of the first experimental British jet powered by Whittle’s W.1 engine. At his request, the British shipped a version of the engine to the U.S., where GE engineers set about replicating it.

As it happened, the American company was in possession of several related technical skills that would prove critical to turning the design into a practical engine. The first was an aptitude for complex metalworking; even more important was GE’s long-standing expertise in building what were known as “turbosuperchargers” for aircraft engines.

Although GE didn’t invent the mechanical device, GE engineer Sanford Moss perfected it and made it safe and practical in boosting piston power in aircraft. Moss was originally seeking to build a better gas turbine. The turbine didn’t pan out, but the engineer successfully used his patented design to fill the cylinders of an aircraft piston engine with more air than it would typically ingest, allowing planes to retain their power at high altitudes. “Moss’ advantage was that he designed his turbosupercharger to divert cooling air to the turbine wheel — the big breakthrough,” says GE Aviation historian Rick Kennedy. “The turbosupercharger ran hot as hell!” (GE brought Moss’ supercharger to Paris this year and displayed it in its pavilion next to the GE9X, the latest GE engine and also the world’s largest.)

Building the first jet engine wasn’t easy. “We didn’t have the right tools,” said Joseph Sorota, one of the GE workers involved in the top-secret effort. “Our wrenches didn’t fit the nuts and bolts because they were on the metric system. We had to grind them open a little more to get inside.” Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

In 1937, as Hitler’s power was growing, GE received a large order from the U.S. Army Air Corps to build turbosuperchargers for Boeing B-17 and Consolidated B-24 bombers, P-38 fighter planes, Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and other planes. The company opened a dedicated supercharger division in Lynn, Massachusetts. It was at Lynn where the Whittle prototype eventually landed. (For his part, Moss landed in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.)

By the time Whittle arrived in 1942, this combination of skills had allowed GE to build a prototype from his design. But it wasn’t easy. “We didn’t have the right tools,” said Joseph Sorota, one of the GE workers involved in the top-secret effort. “Our wrenches didn’t fit the nuts and bolts because they were on the metric system. We had to grind them open a little more to get inside.” The authorities were also watching their every move — an FBI agent made sure to remind Sorota that “if I gave away any secrets, the penalty was death,” he recalled.

Airplane designed Larry Bell climbs into the cockpit of the XP-59, the first U.S.-made jet. The plane was powered by a GE engine based on the Whittle design. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

After several months of nonstop effort, the engine almost worked, but for a puzzling tendency for the bearings to burn up. With Whittle’s help, workers soon spotted the flaw, and within four months were able to try out the engine, called I-A, by attaching a pair to a Bell P-59 plane.   

While the turbojet development ultimately came too late to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the air war, the collaboration began a long tradition of engine technology leadership in the U.S. Today, one the first two General Electric I-A turbojet engines is in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Looking back at the twisting path his father’s idea took from conception to implementation, Ian Whittle sees a lesson that applies to modern technology: Don’t dismiss potential breakthroughs with haughty pessimism. “It was bad advice from a single consultant that convinced the Air Ministry it was a waste of time,” Whittle says.

He also recalls that while his father admired the technical skills of the Americans, he was even more impressed with their enthusiasm for making his idea a practical reality. As he puts it with a chuckle: “I believe this gung-ho attitude to the challenge created a mindset with my father that encouraged him to be more cooperative with GE than was strictly necessary.”

GE brought to Paris Moss’s turbosupercharger (left) as well as the GE9X, the world’s largest commercial jet engine. Image credit: Alex Schroff for GE Reports.

GE’s latest jet engine, the GE9X, keeps piling on the superlatives. Already the world’s largest commercial jet engine, it is also now the most powerful one, according to Guinness World Records.

The records keeper announced today that the GE9X, which GE Aviation developed for Boeing’s new 777X widebody jet, clocked in at 134,300 pounds of thrust during a test run. That’s not too far off the 188,000 pounds of thrust commanded by the Soyuz rocket that helped Yuri Gagarin to become the first human to orbit the Earth. “The GE9X engine incorporates the most advanced technologies that GE Aviation has developed during the last decade and is the culmination of our commercial engine portfolio renewal,” said David Joyce, president and chief executive officer of GE Aviation. “While we didn’t set out to break the thrust Guinness World Records title, we are proud of the engine’s performance, which is a testament to our talented employees and partners who design and build outstanding products for our customers.”

The new record-breaking thrust occurred during an engineering test on Nov. 10, 2017, at GE’s outdoor test facility in Peebles, Ohio. Guinness World Records acknowledged the feat on Friday at a ceremony at GE Aviation’s Ohio headquarters as part of the company’s 100-year celebration.

Another GE engine, the GE90-115B developed for Boeing 777, set the previous record of 127,900 pounds of thrust in 2002.

Joyce unveiled the GE9X engine in June at the Paris Air Show. GE has received orders for more than 700 GE9X engines. That engine, whose front fan is a full 11 feet in diameter, uses the fourth generation of carbon-fiber composite fan blades originally developed for the GE90. It holds parts made from the latest materials like light and heat-resistant ceramic matrix composites, and components made by advanced manufacturing technologies like 3D printing. “The ceramics allowed us to go to 60:1 [pressure ratio] inside the GE9X,” says Ted Ingling, the general manager for the GE9X engine program. “That’s huge. As result, the GE9X engine is not dramatically larger than engines in the GE90 family, even though it’s much more efficient.”

Ingling says the new technologies and materials help make the engine 10% more fuel-efficient that its predecessor. This is a big deal, given that fuel costs amount to as much as 20% of an airline’s operating expenses on average. “The technologies I’ve worked on are out of this world,” he says. “I never have a dull moment.”

Top image credit: GE Aviation.

Just a week after the Fourth of July, a rocket launched high above California’s Mojave Desert. This was no mere tardy display of patriotism; the rocket’s launching team had been preparing for this moment for over four years. On July 10, Sir Richard Branson’s space startup Virgin Orbit fired the rocket at an altitude of 35,000 feet from a modified airplane. The effort was a “drop test,” meaning the rocket plunged to the earth rather than soaring into space, but for more reasons than this, it’s considered groundbreaking.

“What a moment: @virgin.orbit have released our fully built, fully loaded LauncherOne rocket from Cosmic Girl for the first time,” Branson wrote on Instagram just hours after the launch. “Congratulations to all the team.”

Virgin Orbit’s mission is to use the rocket to deploy small satellites into orbit. It will do so by launching not from the ground (as most rockets do), but from under the wing of Cosmic Girl, a modified Boeing 747-400 aircraft that is powered by four GE CF6 jet engines. The benefits of launching from a plane rather than a launch pad? It’s cheaper, it provides more specific placement in orbit, and going by plane (rather than by ground-based launch systems) has shorter wait times.

“We hope to open access to space for companies or organizations who want to put small satellites into orbit by making launch affordable and flexible,” Kelly Latimer, Cosmic Girl’s chief pilot, told GE Reports in an email in 2018. “[We want] to open up space to more people.”

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a … rocket launcher! Sir Richard Branson’s space startup Virgin Orbit has successfully fired a rocket from Cosmic Girl, a modified airplane powered by four GE CF6 jet engines. Virgin Orbit plans to use the rocket to deploy small satellites into orbit. Above and top images credit: Virgin Orbit.

Just after the launch, Latimer declared the endeavor to be a tremendous success. “The release was extremely smooth, and the rocket fell away nicely,” she said. “Everything matched what we’d seen in the simulators well — in fact, the release dynamics and the aircraft handling qualities were both better than we expected. This was the best kind of test flight sortie from a test pilot’s perspective — an uneventful one.”

Cosmic Girl, which has undergone significant refurbishing in order to be capable of tucking a 70-foot rocket under its left wing, flew back to the runway after its first successful dummy launch to prepare for future flights. Now that the company knows the rocket can successfully detach from the plane, the Virgin Orbit team will continue work on an orbital test rocket that will fire satellites into space once it’s released rather than falling to the ground. No rest for the weary, Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart told CNBC prior to the test launch: The company plans to get its first paying customer’s satellites into orbit “hopefully … before the end of the summer.”

Scientists removed HIV from the genomes of mice, used gene editing to help the retina restructure itself, and developed an “EpiPen for spinal cord injuries.” These are big times for bold medical discoveries, but it’s not all serious — we’ve also got soft robotic fish (again!) in this week’s 5 Coolest Things.

An HIV Cure Ahead?

An HIV virus. Top and above images credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Using a combination of treatment and gene-editing therapy, a collaboration between researchers at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine and the University of Nebraska Medical Center was able to completely remove “replication-competent” HIV from the genomes containing the virus in living animals — in this case, mice.

Why does it matter? The study, published in Nature Communications, points a way toward a possible cure for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Currently, people who are infected with HIV manage their condition with antiretroviral therapy, which suppresses replication of the virus in the body but doesn’t eliminate it altogether; accordingly, treatment has to be followed for the length of a patient’s life.

How does it work? Gene editing has been investigated as another way to combat HIV — but, like antiretroviral therapy, it’s also not able to eliminate the virus completely. In this case two approaches were better than one: The team used a form of treatment called long-acting slow-effective release antiretroviral therapy — or LASER ART — to suppress the replication of HIV, then used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to remove remaining fragments of viral DNA. Temple professor Kamel Khalili said, “The big message of this work is that it takes both CRISPR-Cas9 and virus suppression through a method such as LASER ART, administered together, to produce a cure for HIV infection. We now have a clear path to move ahead to trials in non-human primates and possibly clinical trials in human patients within the year.”

Come On In, The Water’s Fine

The team designed an instrument to analyze the quality of liquids using the photoacoustic effect, or the generation of sound waves after light is absorbed in a material. The MU scientists believe this might be the first use of this technology to analyze such small liquid samples. Image credit: University of Missouri.

What is it? At the University of Missouri, a team of scientists has found a way to use sonar — you know, the technology that helps guide submarines — to determine whether water is safe to drink.

Why does it matter? The technology is cheap and quick, said Professor Luis Polo-Parada, a researcher on the project: “If the water isn’t drinkable, then our method will tell you that something is wrong with the water. For instance, if a facility removes salt from sea water in order for water to be safe for drinking, our method can help alert the facility to potential changes such as an issue with the desalination process.” The team is also looking into how its method could be expanded to help manufacturers measure the quality of olive oil or honey, for example, or measure the levels of sugar in soft drinks.

How does it work? The instrument investigates what’s in the water by way of the photoacoustic effect — that’s “the generation of sound waves after light is absorbed in a material,” according to MU. The researchers used a repurposed laser tattoo-removal machine to blast extremely brief pulses of light into a tape-wrapped cable submerged in liquid. The cable converts the light into sound, whose signals are then analyzed. Gary A. Baker, a chemistry professor who worked on the project, compared it to the way that cymbals work: “Sunlight causes the cymbals to heat up and create a constant ringing sound. Here, on a much smaller scale, we create the same effect by sending flashes of laser light at our tiny homemade cymbal, which is the tape, and measure the speed of the sound that is generated.” The team published its findings in Sensors and Actuators B: Chemicals.

Nano Treatment For Spinal Injury

Some 12,000 patients in the United States suffer from spinal injury every year, with trauma sometimes resulting in paralysis below the site of the injury. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed an “EpiPen for spinal cord injuries”— basically, a quick injection of nanoparticles following spinal trauma that might forestall paralysis.

Why does it matter? Some 12,000 patients in the United States suffer from spinal injury every year, with trauma sometimes resulting in paralysis below the site of the injury. According to researchers, that paralysis can result not just from the injury itself but also from the immune system’s overzealous response — it floods the injury site with immune cells that can create inflammation and scar tissue that prevent the regeneration of nerve cells. The Michigan researchers’ injection seeks to head off that reaction, said Lonnie Shea, a biomedical engineering professor: “In this work, we demonstrate that instead of overcoming an immune response, we can co-opt the immune response to work for us to promote the therapeutic response.” Shea and colleagues, who demonstrated their method in mice, published their work in PNAS.

How does it work? The U. of M. researchers designed injectable nanoparticles that redirect immune cells away from the site of the injury, and that — because they’re nonpharmaceutical — don’t come with the sorts of side effects associated with other similar treatments, like steroid injections. According to the university, “With no drugs attached, the nanoparticles reprogram the immune cells with their physical characteristics: a size similar to cell debris and a negative charge that facilitates binding to immune cells. … With fewer immune cells at the trauma location, there is less inflammation and tissue deterioration. Second, immune cells that do make it to the injury are less inflammatory and more suited to supporting tissues that are trying to grow back together.”

Seeing Eye

Retinal cells with (bottom) and without gene therapy. Image credit:  Wang et al., JNeurosci 2019.

What is it? With a little help from gene therapy, the retina can restructure itself, possibly combating blindness, according to new research from scientists at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, the Duke University School of Medicine and the University of California’s Stein Eye Institute.

Why does it matter?“A major cause of human blindness is the death of rod photoreceptors,” the researchers write in a new paper in JNeurosci. Rods are one of the two types of photoreceptors in the eye, the other being cones. According to a release from the Society for Neuroscience, “Current treatments have been developed that can save dying rods, but it was not known if the retina could rebuild itself after treatment, which is a key component of regaining vision.”

How does it work? The team tested their gene-editing hypothesis on mice subjects “with genetically defective rods that mimic developmental blindness disorders in humans.” They found that the rods that received gene therapy were able to reestablish normal light responses and also normal connections to other retinal neurons — findings that, they say, highlight a “surprising degree of plasticity” in the retina itself.

Soft Robotic Fish School

What is it? This is a golden age if you’re a researcher working in the soft-robotic-fish space, and now a master’s student at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has made another soft robotic leap, claiming to have designed the world’s fastest soft robotic fish. This week he released a video of the creation, which can cruise up to .85 meters per second, or nearly 3 feet.

Why does it matter? According to the video, robotic fins could be a worthy alternative to propellers for underwater craft: Flapping is more efficient, and a lack of “external rotating parts” could allow such craft to operate under the higher-pressure conditions of deeper ocean depths. Plus, it looks cool as heck.

How does it work? The fish uses a single motor that operates a wire — set in a soft, pliant body — to move the tail back and forth, propelling the fish through the water.

It’s hard to remember what the online shopping experience was like before Amazon started its Prime shipping service in 2005. The immensely popular service, which gives customers two-day shipping for a flat yearly fee, is a big reason why Amazon has come to dominate online sales.

But meeting those high customer expectations is a big job. In 2007, Amazon spent $2 billion on logistics and shipping; last year those annual costs reached nearly $62 billion, according to Statista, and rose even as a percentage of sales, from less than 20% to more than 26%.

In recent years, Amazon has also started bringing its shipping business in-house, including operating its own network of cargo planes: 41 wide-body Boeing 767s and four narrow-body 737s. Amazon plans to increase the fleet to 70 sometime next year. To meet these aggressive expansion targets, Amazon has turned for help to GE Capital Aviation Services, or GECAS, one of the largest aircraft leasing company in the world.

Earlier this year, Amazon agreed to lease five planes from GECAS, and at the Paris Air Show in June, Amazon and GE announced a deal for another 15 planes. All of them are Boeing 737-800 freighters, which are smaller than the Boeing 767-300 freighters that make up the bulk of Amazon’s fleet. “The additional 15 aircraft, on top of five we agreed to this year, give us more agility,” says Sarah Rhodes, director of Amazon Air.

For GECAS, the Amazon deal is further confirmation that the company’s cargo business is riding the paradigm shift in online retail, where customers think nothing of buying three dresses or shirts online and returning two. Top and above images credit: Alex Schroff for GE Reports.

Smaller planes provide an important link in Amazon’s shipping network. If a customer in New Jersey orders a shirt from Amazon Prime, it might be fulfilled at an Amazon warehouse in Seattle and flown on a big 767 across the country to Wilmington, Ohio, where Amazon recently opened a hub. Next, workers may load the shirt on a smaller 737 and send it to Allentown, Pennsylvania, before transferring it to trucks for the final leg. “It’s more economical to fly a full 737 than a half-full 767,” Rhodes says. “These aircraft are critical for us to ensure that we make our deliveries on time.”

For GECAS, the Amazon deal is further confirmation that the company’s cargo business is riding the paradigm shift in online retail, where customers think nothing of buying three dresses or shirts online and returning two. “Amazon is a great customer to have on the program,” says Richard Greener, head of the cargo group. “Other e-commerce companies around the world will look at what they’re doing and  replicate it.”

Part of GECAS’ cargo business takes passenger planes that have reached their midlife  age, typically 16 years, and converts them to cargo planes equipped with CFM56 engines developed by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE Aviation and Safran Aircraft Engines. Out go the rows of seats, creating large space where the cargo will go. Aluminum honeycomb bulkheads, designed to withstand 9 Gs of impact, protect the cockpit in the event that cargo breaks loose in the hold. “That’s important for keeping the crew safe and sound,” says Alvey Pratt, director for converted freighters and complex modifications at Boeing Global Services.

Once the planes are converted, GECAS can typically lease them for another 16-20 years, leasing them to other companies like Amazon. This also generates more engine parts sales and shop visits for CFM. Although cargo is only 6% of GECAS’ business — it also leases passenger planes and helicopters, among other things — it is the largest leasing company of cargo aircraft in the world, says Greener, with the portfolio growing to around 90 aircraft in the next three years, including 55 orders with Boeing.

“There’s a big replacement market for these types of aircraft,” Greener says. “We believe the market will call for over 300 over the next 11 or 12 years. GECAS will continue to be a major player in this sector.”

Looking at the whole industry, Boeing projects that air cargo traffic will double over the next 20 years, requiring the world’s freighter fleet to grow from approximately 1,870 to 3,260 freighters. More than 60% of the new freighters will be passenger-to-freighter conversions.

Last week, the Turkish renewable-energy operator Borusan EnBW Enerji announced an order for 27 Cypress wind turbines— GE Renewable Energy’s largest land-based wind turbine. The first one set down roots in Holland earlier this year, and the wind turbine “platform” continues to spread its canopy. Or, rather, spread its blades: The rotor uses three revolutionary blades that can be transported and assembled from two pieces, allowing the diameter of this machine to stretch a stupendous 158 meters. That’s about the same length as a midsize New York City skyscraper turned on its side — all the better to capture wind and convert it to electricity. The new order, which marks the first sale for the Cypress in Turkey, will provide enough capacity to power the equivalent of 190,000 homes in that country. Manar Al-Moneef, president and CEO of onshore wind for the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, said, “Borusan EnBW Enerji is one of the biggest investors in wind energy in Turkey, and we are thrilled to be working together and help our customer reach its renewable energy goals.”

Also last week, GE Renewable Energy announced that it had been selected to provide 81 onshore wind turbines to power the 220 MW Potegowo Wind Project in northern Poland. Peter Wells, onshore wind CEO for Europe and sub-Saharan Africa at GE Renewable Energy, said the deal is a chance to “reiterate our commitment to bring sustainable green electrons to the Polish grid.” When completed, the project will be one of the largest wind farms in Poland and will bring GE Renewable Energy’s installed base in the country from 580 MW to a whopping 800 MW. The wind farm is expected to help save 480,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

Top image: The first Cypress set down roots earlier this year, and the wind turbine “platform” continues to spread its canopy. Above: The Cypress platform at a glance. (Click to enlarge.) Top and above images credit: GE Renewable Energy.

GE and BlackRock, the giant investment firm with trillions in assets under management, have agreed to build a new solar industry powerhouse. Called Distributed Solar Development, the company will design, build, own and operate distributed solar and storage solutions for customers.

The new firm will stand on a bedrock of GE’s solar business launched by GE executive Erik Schiemann in 2012. He launched GE Solar as a nimble startup looking to design and build renewable onsite energy solutions for customers. Today, the business has more than 60 employees — with a collective experience exceeding 3 gigawatts — that have developed more than 125 solar-power sites for customers in industrial, commercial and government sectors. GE will retain 20% of the business; BlackRock takes an 80% stake.

The BlackRock deal is intended to put Distributed Solar Development, or DSD, in a good position to build on the demand for new distributed solar generating capacity. Indeed, DSD has ambitious growth targets. Currently, it builds about 100 megawatts of on-site solar projects each year; in five years, it hopes to quadruple that project pipeline. “

BlackRock Real Assets will supercharge this development expertise with capital. The firm, which manages $6 trillion in assets, operates one of the largest renewable power equity investment platforms in the world with $5 billion invested in over 250 solar and wind projects across the globe, with a total generation capacity of over 5.2 GW. “This investment will deepen our clients’ access to the tremendous growth potential in the U.S. solar industry,” says David Giordano, global head of renewable power at BlackRock. “DSD offers end-to-end in-house capabilities and a strong team of experts from across the commercial and industrial value chain. We look forward to working with the DSD team to capitalize on the development opportunities presented by the growing interest in renewable energy on behalf of our clients.”

Operating as a standalone company will also streamline DSD’s operations. “Separating ourselves from GE in this fashion means I can now do things more simply, with lower costs of capital, lower transaction costs, [greater] speed to execution and kind of that one-throat-to-choke from our customers’ perspective,” Schiemann says.

When DSD got started seven years ago, the market for on-site solar power plants was served mainly by local solar firms that sometimes promised more than they could deliver. The prevailing business model was centered on building installations that customers would finance and own. The idea behind DSD was to lower the relatively high barrier to entry. By bringing GE’s resources to bear, DSD sought to provide consistent, high-quality soup-to-nuts service that would make solar a slam-dunk decision.

DSD would not only build and operate solar installations for its customers, but also finance them and retain ownership, and early success provided proof of this concept. Schiemann recalls getting wind of a paper manufacturer, just north of New York City, that was looking to supplement its energy supply with on-site solar energy. “First we focused on whether we could build an on-site solar field for them. Then we went ahead and figured out how to do it (as a business).”

Once the deal went through, employees at competing energy development firms began to reach out to Schiemann to see what GE was up to. “People in the market started to say, ‘Wow, you might be on to something,’” he says.

From the beginning, DSD was not a standard GE venture. It offered to put together optimal solutions for its customers even if that meant using products not manufactured by GE. It had no factories or big service contracts. Some executives saw distributed solar power as a threat to the traditional power business, which has been based on a hub-and-spoke model of energy transmission ever since GE and its customers pioneered it a century ago. “There was a lot of debate about what I was doing,” says Schiemann. “I argued that if we don’t try to disrupt our own business, someone else will.”

He got it right. Schiemann’s customers, in the end, wanted the benefits of having a power source on-site, tailored to their needs, requiring no large capital outlay. When Home Depot agreed to allow DSD to build more than 10 megawatts of solar plants on its East Coast stores, the logic of distributed power was well on its way to becoming mainstream. Now it’s conventional wisdom.

Top image credit: Distributed Solar Development

If you read these pages frequently,  you know that GE engineers have designed some mind-blowing machines, like the GE9X jet engine whose front end is larger than the diameter of a Boeing 737, or the Haliade-X wind turbine which measures 260 meters from heel to blade tips and has the capacity to power 12,000 European homes. Along the way, they have also managed to stake a claim to a series of power, speed and durability records. Many of the records are well-known, some less so; some have the novelty of being recognized by “Guinness World Records”, others are known for setting the standard in their industry. Scroll through the slideshow and see for yourself.

Most Powerful Jet Engine

The GE9X engine will power Boeing’s new 777X wide-body jets. Image credit: Boeing. Top image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports.

The world’s largest commercial jet engine is now officially the world’s most powerful, too. “Guinness World Records” recently confirmed the GE9X generated the most thrust by a commercial engine ever, in a 2017 test in GE’s Peebles, Ohio, facility. The GE9X clocked in at 134,300 pounds of thrust. By comparison, Yuri Gagarin vaulted into space on a Soyuz rocket generating 188,000 pounds of thrust, while an F-16 Fighting Falcon pushes 27,000 pounds of thrust.

The Second Most Powerful Jet Engine

At a 2002 test stand, the GE90-115B jet engine generated 127,900 pounds of thrust. That was enough to place it in “Guinness World Records” as the most powerful jet engine, a title it held until the GE9X. But the engine is still graceful enough that one of its blades was featured in New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of its architecture and design collection. GE developed the engine for the popular Boeing 777. Artist Luca Iaconi-Stewart made a mind-bending paper model of the jet, including the engines. See the video above.

Powering the Fastest Ferry

Video credit: Brand Tasmania.

The world’s fastest ferry, the Francisco, is powered by two aircraft engine-based GE gas turbines driving a pair of water jets. Built at Australia’s Incat shipyard, it can reach speeds of 58.1 knots, or 67 miles an hour. The Francisco can carry more than 1,000 passengers and 150 cars on its regular route between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay. It’s also the first ferry to use liquefied natural gas as a primary fuel, which places it among the most environmentally friendly and efficient ships in the world.

Fastest Circumnavigation by Passenger Jet

A GEnx jet engine during testing at GE Aviation’s test facility in Peebles, Ohio. Image credit: GE Aviation.

When a Boeing 787 Dreamliner landed in Seattle at 5:29 a.m. on Dec. 8, 2011, it had set the record for the fastest flight around the world by a jetliner in the 440,000-550,000-pound class, clocking 42 hours and 27 minutes to circumnavigate the globe. Powered by two GEnx-1B engines, the plane flew from Seattle eastward until stopping to refuel in Dhaka, Bangladesh. That leg set its own record — for longest distance flown by its weight class — at 10,337 nautical miles. The plane finished its journey flying over Guam and Hawaii on its way back to North America.

Most Efficient Power Plant

This record-breaking power plant in Bouchain can power 680,000 French homes. The gas and steam turbines are inside the red structure on the left. The steam cooling tower is on the right. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

The Guinness record holder for the most efficient combined power plant is run by a GE 9HA.01 turbine. The plant, near Bouchain, France, converts natural gas to energy at a previously unattained 62% rate — that’s the power equivalent of running a 4-minute mile. The GE-designed turbine inside the power plant, which has the capacity to power some 680,000 European homes, uses the latest technologies with supercomputer-aided design.

Fastest Business Jet

Bombardier brought a Passport-powered Global 7500 jet to the Paris Air Show in June. Image credit: Alex Schroff for GE Reports.

This year, a Bombardier Global 7500 luxury jet set a distance and speed record for a purpose-built business jet when it covered 8,152 nautical miles between Singapore and Tucson, Arizona, in 16 hours and 6 minutes “with fuel to spare,” according to the plane-maker. The engines vaulting the jet through the sky? Two GE Passport jet engines, which are the present-day evolution of engines originally designed in the 1970s for the supersonic B-1 bomber. At its top speed, the Bombardier jet can fly at Mach 0.925, almost at the speed of sound.

Largest Onshore And Offshore Wind Turbines

The aptly named Cypress is the world’s largest land-based wind turbine in operation, with a turbine diameter spanning 158 meters. All that length helps the Cypress capture more wind, which in turn generates more electricity. A Cypress prototype is powering through tests in the Netherlands, with the continent expected to be the biggest market for the GE wind turbine. Each Cypress will generate about 5 megawatt-hours, enough to power about 5,000 European homes. In Holland, GE is erecting the Haliade-X, the most powerful offshore wind turbine. The Haliade-X is the industry’s first 12MW offshore turbine with a yield improvement of 15% over other offshore turbines.

Longest Range Single-Aisle Jetliner

The carrier La Compagnie brought a brand new A321neo to the Paris Air Show in June. Image credit: Alex Schroff for GE Reports.

The Airbus A321neo celebrated its entry into commercial service last year by clocking the longest-range flight by a single-aisle passenger jet, some 4,750 nautical miles from Seychelles to Toulouse, France. The plane was using LEAP jet engines, developed by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE and Safran Aircraft Engines. More than an item for the record books, proof an efficient single-aisle jet can perform long-haul flights allows airlines to offer more direct routes between city pairs not seen before, such as one airline’s opening of a Los Angeles-Reykjavik leg last year.

Fastest Jet-Powered Train

In 1966, railroad engineer Don Wetzel bought a pair of GE J47-19 jet engines from a surplus Air Force bomber, bolted them to the roof of a stock commuter car, and took his contraption, called M-497, for a spin. On his second trip, the train sped along at 183 miles-per-hour, a speed record for jet-powered trains that still stands today.

Farthest (and Longest Running) Satellites

Image credit: GE Reports.

Voyagers 1 and 2 are the farthest objects built by people from Earth, now about 13.5 and 11.2 billion miles from Earth, respectively. Launched in 1977, they are still beaming data back to mission control today. GE engineers designed their command computers to direct the flight path and provide communication links with NASA Mission Control, as well as the probes’ power source called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). NASA expects both Voyagers to continue operating and sending data for several more years, during which they will extend their title as the longest-operating satellites ever built.

Helping Put the First Man on the Moon

Astronaut footprint on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Image credit: Getty Images.

GE engineering helped put astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Materials for their boots and helmet visors were designed by GE, as well as the Apollo program’s radio command and guidance equipment. GE engineers also tested Apollo 11’s command and lunar modules. Between 1961 and 1972, 6,000 GE employees from 37 different operations helped NASA run the Apollo program and send 24 people to the moon and back. GE also supplied NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine, who ran the agency during the historic first moon landing. Paine returned to GE in 1970. He spent 17 years with the company.

July 18, 2019

GOING SOLAR

In 2012, Erik Schiemann launched GE’s solar business as a nimble startup that would design and build renewable on-site energy solutions for the company’s customers. Today GE Solar has more than 60 employees — with a collective experience exceeding 3 gigawatts — and has developed more than 125 solar power sites across industrial, commercial and governmental sectors. And its star continues to rise: This week, the company announced that it was partnering with investment giant BlackRock Real Assets to form Distributed Solar Development (DSD), a new industry powerhouse that will design, build, own and operate distributed solar solutions for its customers. GE will retain 20% of the business, while BlackRock takes an 80% stake.

Star power: With $5 billion invested in over 250 solar and wind projects globally, BlackRock already operates one of the largest renewable power equity investment platforms in the world — so the new partnership will supercharge DSD’s solar expertise with capital. “This investment will deepen our clients’ access to the tremendous growth potential in the U.S. solar industry,” says David Giordano, global head of renewable power at BlackRock. “DSD offers end-to-end in-house capabilities and a strong team of experts from across the commercial and industrial value chain.” The shiny new business is launching with ambitious goals: While the GE unit built about 100 megawatts of on-site solar projects annually, DSD hopes to quadruple that project pipeline in five years.

When Schiemann launched GE Solar, he said, “there was a lot of debate about what I was doing.” Click here to learn about how he was ahead of the curve on solar — and what’s next for the industry.

PRIME MOVERS

Now that Prime Day has come and gone, online shoppers can catch their breath — and so can Amazon, for whom the two-day sale is one of the top-grossing events of the year. The retail giant revolutionized online shopping in 2005 when it introduced its Prime shipping service, which has surged in popularity: In 2007 Amazon spent $2 billion on logistics and shipping, and last year it spent $62 billion. To keep up, Amazon has started operating its own network of cargo planes. It’s got 45 aircraft currently in the company fleet, with ambitious plans to increase the number to 70 planes sometime next year. How do you pull off such a massive investment in heavy equipment? You call up GE Capital Aviation Services, or GECAS, one of the largest aircraft leasing companies in the world. Amazon agreed to lease five planes from GECAS earlier this year — then, last month at the Paris Air Show, announced a deal for another 15.

New lease on life: Part of GECAS’ business involves taking some passenger planes approaching middle age — typically 16 years — and converting them to cargo planes. The planes then continue operating for another 16 to 20 years, leased to companies like Amazon. The deals announced this year were all for Boeing 737-800 freighters, which are smaller than the Boeing 767-300s that make up the bulk of Amazon’s fleet. Smaller planes provide an important link in Amazon’s shipping network — they can transport merchandise, for instance, from bigger hubs to the smaller nodes in the network where it’ll be loaded onto trucks for final delivery. “It’s more economical to fly a full 737 than a half-full 767,” says Sarah Rhodes, director of Amazon Air. “These aircraft are critical for us to ensure that we make our deliveries on time.”

Leasing aircraft for cargo is a big business — and GECAS is a major player in it. Learn more here.

SOME FOR THE BOOKS

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moonwalk. To get there, the trio of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins relied on technology designed by GE, including computers monitoring the Saturn V rocket before takeoff, helmet visors and silicone rubber for the soles of their moon boots, as well as support during testing of the rocket’s powerful boosters. NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine, who led the agency during the first moon landing, also came aboard from GE. Helping put the first man on the moon, though, is one of many records GE has been part of throughout its long history. Just this month, GE Aviation’s new GE9X jet engine was certified by “Guinness World Records” as the most powerful commercial jet engine in the world. (It was already considered the largest.) From global aviation to extra-orbital space travel and everything in between, we’ve put together a collection of GE’s Greatest Hits: Record Breakers edition.

Trains, planes and … ferry boats? It’s not just flight the company’s has helped conquer. In 1966, railroad engineer Don Wetzel set a speed record for jet-powered trains that still stands today. (In the ultimate don’t-try-this-at-home project, Wetzel strapped a couple of surplus GE engines from an Air Force jet bomber to a stock commuter car.) The world’s fastest ferry, an Australian-built ship that transports passengers and cars between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay, is powered by two GE gas turbines and can achieve speeds of 58.1 knots, or 67 mph. Then there’s tech powering the farthest-traveling satellites, the largest wind turbines, engines for the most efficient business jet, and — oh, yeah — the second-most powerful jet engine, too.

Click here for a slideshow of achievements — some famous, some less so — that’ve landed GE and its engineers in the record books.

— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —

— QUOTE OF THE DAY —

“People in the market started to say, ‘Wow, you might be on to something.’”

— Erik Schiemann, founder and CEO of GE Solar

Quote: GE Reports. Image: From the collection of the Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

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Fifty years ago this month, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were sitting inside an aluminum can roughly the size and shape of a New York City water tower, zipping at 24,000 miles per hour to the moon. On July 20, 1969, after covering more than 240,000 miles, Armstrong and Aldrin took control of the landing module attached to the spacecraft’s nose, took off for a landing site in the Sea of Tranquility some 60 miles below them on the lunar surface, and became the first humans to walk on the surface of the moon.

Some 650 million people watched Armstrong step down the ladder and proclaim that the feat was “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But few had a better view of the achievement than GE researcher and executive Thomas O. Paine, who at the time served as NASA administrator, the person responsible for leading the astronauts, agency and nation to its triumph.

Paine, then 46 years old, left GE to join NASA as deputy administrator in January 1968 and was promoted to acting administrator nine months later by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, after NASA director James Webb retired. In March 1969, he was confirmed by the Senate as the third administrator in NASA’s history. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Johnson charged Paine with “fulfilling John F. Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.”

Fulfill he did. Paine was at NASA’s helm on Christmas Eve 1968, when Apollo 8 crew Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders orbited the moon for the first time and took the iconic image of Earthrise, a blue half marble of Earth suspended in the blackness of space above the grey lunar surface. The astronauts took turns reading the first 10 verses of the Book of Genesis, during what was then the most-watched television broadcast.

The accomplishment, the images and the words on a special night —“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…” — conjured a magical moment for Americans that year. The country was mired in a war in Vietnam. At home, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had recently been assassinated, student protests were spreading across university campuses, and social unrest was rocking neighborhoods across the country. “1968 was a year of recrimination and doubt, a time of anti-heroes rather than heroes,” Paine told GE’s magazine, The Monogram. “Apollo 8 went around the moon at Christmas at the end of a disastrous year that featured riots and assassinations and all kinds of problems. Frank Borman’s triumph and reading of Genesis from space seemed to be completely out of context with the time.”

“I think that anybody in our society today who is bored is the most insensitive clod that ever existed,” Paine told The Monogram, a GE magazine, in 1970, as more humans were arriving on the moon. “I don’t see how anybody can get bored in these times.” Image credit: The Monogram. Top image: Paine was at NASA’s helm during the historic Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The Apollo program, of course, was far from finished. In May 1969, the Apollo 10 mission sent the lunar module hovering a few miles above the moon’s surface, making final calibrations and adjustments for Apollo 11’s giant leap on July 20, 1969, and the subsequent landings that brought 24 Americans to the moon, including 12 who walked on the moon’s surface. Paine believed that the mission to the moon succeeded because of the way NASA operated, as a partnership pooling the best talent recruited from the government, industry, and universities. Some 400,000 people and 20,000 companies were involved in the program supercharged by President Kennedy’s speech in 1961 until the last man to stand on the moon, Eugene Cernan, safely returned home. By comparison, some 75,000 workers — the estimates vary — built the Panama Canal, another outsize project were GE also played an important role. Journalist Charles Fishman wrote in his recent book, “One Giant Leap,” about the Apollo program that “in some ways, NASA had to invent large-project management for the modern era, while supervising the invention and perfection of technology to do something that has never been done before, all inside an agency that was itself not even three years old when Kennedy charged it to go to the moon, wasn’t having much success to that point.”

The push to the moon included some 6,000 of Paine’s GE colleagues, who built the computers and wrote the software that allowed NASA to monitor the massive Saturn V rockets on the launchpad until takeoff. They engineered the silicon rubber for the soles of the moonwalkers’ boots and also the Lexan visors for their helmets. Another team built an “atomic battery” designed to power scientific experiments on the moon, and yet another, some 1,200-person strong, spent the 1960s at a massive NASA site in Mississippi, testing the rocket engines, support systems and overall readiness of the Saturn V, which, towering at 363 feet and generating 7.5 million pounds of thrust, remains the world’s most powerful rocket.

The work involved strapping the five engines of the rocket’s first stage to a massive concrete block and “keeping the straining rockets on the test stand while 2,200 tons of burning liquid oxygen urge it skyward,” according to The Monogram. How much strain? The five engines of the S-IC stage, as the bottom part of the rocket was called, consumed 15 tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen per second to generate 160 million horsepower. “The company employees at the site measure the performance of the engines and all stage systems, simultaneously recording vibration, temperature, thrust, fuel flow, pressures strain and other vital information,” the GE magazine reported. “Our mission is a key part of assuring success of the world’s mightiest space boosters and national space program,” said GE’s William R. Eaton, who ran the Mississippi Test Support Operation.

Image credit: The Monogram.

GE then transferred the monitoring know-how to the launch site at Cape Kennedy, later renamed Cape Canaveral, where a GE mainframe computer tracked the rockets during the final hours of countdown, “continuously reading more than 3,000 measurements of critical valves and gauges of the Saturn — 12 times a second,” The Monogram said. “For all Apollo flights, our system processes volumes of data, converts into meaningful terms, and displays it on TV-like terminals in response to real-time requests,” said Stewart Matthews, a GE information systems manager assigned to Kennedy Space Center.

GE employees not only worked on the technology and managed the Apollo program, but they also signed up for spaceflight. Engineer Elliot See, who worked in Evendale, Ohio — now the headquarters of GE Aviation — became a GE test pilot and then, after spending 12 years at the company, an astronaut in 1962. In 1965, See and Neil Armstrong became the first civilians selected for spaceflight when NASA picked them as the backup crew for a Gemini mission, “which will be the longest spaceflight ever attempted,” the Tampa Bay Times said at the time. But unlike Armstrong, See never got to walk on the moon. He and fellow astronaut Charles Bassett II were killed during a training flight in 1966.

GE’s William R.  Eaton and Wernher von Braun, the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle. Image credit: The Monogram.

Paine left his post as NASA administrator and returned to GE to run the company’s power business in 1970, after the successful second moon landing on Apollo 12 in November 1969, and after the crew of Apollo 13 returned safely home following an oxygen tank explosion and fire in the command module 200,000 miles from Earth. Fishman wrote in “One Giant Leap” that solving the Apollo 13 crisis was emblematic of NASA’s management prowess:

“Even when disaster struck on Apollo 13, the determined rescue effort and the courage of the mission’s astronauts, all playing out hour after hour on live TV, only underscored the cool, fearless, implacable competence of NASA’s staff. In a near hopeless situation, in which they didn’t know what the right thing to do was, NASA’s engineers and scientists, its technicians and astronauts and managers, dissected and solved one problem after another, right up to the moment the Apollo 13 capsule and its astronauts were dropping toward the Pacific Ocean under three orange-and-white parachutes.”

Born in 1921, Paine studied engineering at Brown University and Stanford. The son of a Navy commodore, he spent World War II in the Pacific as a submarine officer. After the fighting ended — and never one to shy from a daunting task — he sailed back to Pearl Harbor a captured Japanese submarine so large it was capable of launching planes. “Yes, it was interesting,” he told The Monogram, “all the controls on the boat were in Japanese with American labels made by our crew dangling from them.”

Paine joined GE Research in Schenectady, New York, in 1949 as a research associate, where he started programs studying magnetic and composite materials. In 1951, he moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, the very plant that built the first American jet engine, to focus on material development, and then quickly rose through the company ranks.

His colleagues at GE Research also benefited from the success of the Apollo 11 mission. The research center was one of the sites selected to study the rocks Armstrong and Aldrin brought back from the moon and determine their age and what cosmic radiation did to them. “Results of their study will help astronomers to reconstruct the history of the solar system,” The Monogram wrote. GE researchers also studied space helmets worn by Apollo astronauts.

Talking about his NASA experience with the L.A. Times, Paine, who died in 1992, said that “it was indeed a feeling of participating in an enormously historical time, when life had taken the first step across the void of space to bring humans to another world. People were willing to sacrifice and bleed and die to do that. It inspired everybody on the Apollo program to perform far beyond their normal capabilities.”

GE scientists inspected moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts. Image credit: The Monogram.

In the early fall of 1962, Neil Armstrong climbed into a car with GE test pilot Elliot See Jr. at what is now called the Armstrong Flight Research Facility in Edwards, California. They set out for NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston some 1,600 miles away. “I don’t remember whether the car was his or mine,” Armstrong mused in the book Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching For The Moon. “If it were his, it would have been a convertible; he loved convertibles. He was enjoyable company; we enjoyed being together and wondering what our future would be.”

The entire world knows what Armstrong’s future held: he became the first human to walk on the moon. But See, whose prospects were as bright as Armstrong’s when they set out east from California on that day, had just four years to live.

Armstrong and See — then 35 and a father of three, including a month-old son — were part of a batch of nine astronauts NASA brought on board for its Gemini and Apollo missions. Their group included Frank Borman, who would later become the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission piloted by humans to orbit the moon. There was also Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, who safely guided his wounded spaceship home after disaster struck 200,000 miles away from Earth. Armstrong and See were the only civilians.

In their time together at NASA, Armstrong and See became good friends, according to The First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, the astronaut’s biography. (The actor Patrick Fugit plays See in the Hollywood version of the book.) In 1965, they were picked to be the backup crew for the Gemini V mission. “This was to be the first long duration flight,” Armstrong told the authors of Fallen Astronauts. “From the spring to fall of ’65 we were together constantly; flying to the Cape [Canaveral], to North Carolina (for astronomy experiment development), to McDonnell Aircraft (to test the spacecraft), sitting in the simulator for endless hours developing rendezvous techniques and entry profiles, and learning the spacecraft systems.”

But they never got to see the Earth from space together. In 1966, See was selected as the commander of the Gemini IX mission together with Charles Basset. It would be their first space flight and they were to perform a spacewalk and dock with a satellite. On February 28, 1966, See and Basset climbed inside a trainer jet and flew to St. Louis, Missouri, where McDonnell-Douglass had just finished their Gemini capsule. Trying to land in bad weather that day, their plane crashed and they were both killed. They are buried next to each other at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Some 6,000 GE employees were involved in the Apollo program, including Tom Paine, whose led NASA during the historic first moon landing. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady. Top image credit: The Monogram/Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

See had flying and engines in his blood. Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1927, his father, Elliott See Sr., was an electrical engineer who spent 36 years working for GE. Following his dad’s footsteps, See Jr. earned his engineering degree from the Merchant Marine Academy and joined GE in 1949, first on the company’s “test program” at a switchgear factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later in Lynn, Massachusetts, where GE manufactured gas turbines for some of the first jet engines.

It was in Lynn where See got his first taste of flying. As GE was ramping up its jet engine production, it also launched a flight test group. Meeting the members of this small team at the factory inspired See to start spending time at an airport in Revere, a town close to the plant, and earn his private pilot’s license.

But his engineering career was also propelling him across the country. Within a few years, he was dispatched to GE Research in Schenectady, New York, where he was assigned to work on afterburners for jet engines and ramjets, even today a revolutionary form of aircraft propulsion. By 1951, he was able to fuse his deep engineering knowledge of jet engines with his passion for flying, becoming a flight test engineer at Evendale, Ohio, now the headquarters of GE Aviation.

Always seemingly on the rise, he joined the Navy in 1953 to become a jet pilot but returned to GE three years later as a test pilot at the company’s Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. By the time he applied to be an astronaut, he had logged 3,700 hours of flying time, including 3,200 hours in jet aircraft, some powered by GE’s first supersonic engine.

NASA picked the Next Nine from 253 applicants, which the agency whittled down to 31 who got invited to the final round of tests and interviews. See got the good news from Mercury astronaut Donald Slayton, who phoned him in September 1962. “Overwhelmed isn’t the right word,” he told The Monogram when the GE magazine asked him about his reaction. GE Chairman Ralph Cordiner also telegraphed his congratulations. “I know that all General Electric employees share my pride that you will be contributing your experience and skill to such an important project. We all wish you success in the months ahead.” Added See Sr.: “I wish I were younger and could trade places with him!”

A few days later, Armstrong was waiting in a car.

The movements of a tiny 3D-printed robot can be controlled by vibration, a large drone will look for signs of life on Saturn’s moon Titan, and researchers designed a “Trojan horse” drug delivery system that tricks tumors into letting in drugs that can kill them. Oh, the places you’ll go in this week’s 5 Coolest Things.

Small Is Bot-iful

What is it? Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created tiny 3D-printed robots— at 2 millimeters long and 5 milligrams, they’re about the size of the world’s smallest ant — that move in response to vibration and “can cover four times their own length in a second despite the physical limitations of their small size.”

Why does it matter? Other kinds of micro-robots are often controlled by magnetic field — which works fine if you’re trying to move a swarm of them, but is less effective on the individual level. The researchers see many potential applications for their tiny vibration-controlled creations, which could be employed to “sense environmental changes, move materials — or perhaps one day repair injuries inside the human body.” Azadeh Ansari, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said, “We are working at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, biology and physics. It’s a very rich area and there’s a lot of room for multidisciplinary concepts.”

How does it work? The robots consist of a 3D-printed body fused to a piezoelectric actuator that generates vibrations — or the vibrations can come from an external source, such as ultrasound, sonar or acoustic speaker. The vibrations cause the legs to move. Ansari said, “As the micro-bristle-bots move up and down, the vertical motion is translated into a directional movement by optimizing the design of the legs, which look like bristles. The legs of the micro-robot are designed with specific angles that allow them to bend and move in one direction in resonant response to the vibration.” The research is described further in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Distant Moon Shot

If everything goes as planned, the NASA vessel Dragonfly will be making its way around the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, as early as 2034. According to NASA, it will be possible for Dragonfly to cover more ground than all of the Mars rovers combined. Above image credit: NASA/JHU-APL. Top image credit: NASA.

What is it? Announced this summer and launching in 2026, the NASA craft Dragonfly will hopscotch around the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, to look for signs of “prebiotic chemical processes” that might lead to life. Dragonfly has eight rotors and moves like a large drone; the mission marks the first time NASA is sending a multi-rotor vehicle to perform scientific measurements on another planet.

Why does it matter?“Titan is an analog to the very early Earth, and can provide clues to how life may have arisen on our planet,” NASA said in a news release. Dragonfly will travel around the moon taking measurements from a variety of different environments, starting with dune fields similar to those in Namibia and ending its trip at an impact crater where it will investigate past evidence of water. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, “Visiting this mysterious ocean world could revolutionize what we know about life in the universe.”

How does it work? The craft is scheduled to arrive in 2034; NASA is using data collected from an earlier Saturn mission, Cassini, to determine, weather-wise, when is a good time to land. Once it’s dropped off on Titan, Dragonfly will travel over 108 miles — more than twice the distance covered by all the Mars rovers combined. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said, “It’s remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn’s largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment. Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself.”

Mind Reader

Thread-like electrodes in the brain of an animal may be able to record the activity of neurons. Elon Musk is developing the technology, and his ambitious plan may lead to humans being able to control objects with their minds. Image credit: Neuralink.

What is it? This week, billionaire inventor Elon Musk reported on an ambitious project that’s neither a tunnel under LA nor a space taxi: Speaking at the California Academy of Sciences, Musk unveiled an interface that could enable seamless communication between computers and the human brain. He said the tech, developed by his company Neuralink, might be ready for human testing as early as next year.

Why does it matter? Brain-computer interfaces, or BCI, are a hot topic in scientific circles these days: Technology that can read brain activity and turn it into legible data could, for instance, allow people with quadriplegia to control a computer or a smartphone simply with their thoughts. Musk is thinking even bigger than that, according to Scientific American: “He seeks to enable humans to ‘merge’ with AI, giving people superhuman intelligence — an objective that is much more hype than an actual plan for new technology development.” You gotta start somewhere, though.

How does it work? Tested thus far in rats, the Neuralink system consists of 3,000 flexible electrodes implanted into the cortex by a surgical robot, and connected to a USB port outside the brain. Columbia University professor Ken Shepard told Scientific American that three elements of Musk’s system are key to advancing the field of BCI: flexible electrodes, miniaturized electronics and wireless communication — the third being a goal Musk’s team hasn’t quite gotten to yet. “They have made significant progress in the first two,” Shepard said. (Here’s a video of Musk’s talk.)

The Key To Looking 20 Years Younger? RNA

A team of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researchers may have found one of the keys to two of the most popular skin treatments. Double-stranded RNA was found to be an active factor in both retinoic acid and laser rejuvenation. Image credit: Roberto Delgado Webb on Unsplash.

What is it? For folks trying to erase aging-related wrinkles, sun spots and other blemishes, two popular treatments are retinoic acid and laser rejuvenation. In a new study in Nature Communications, researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine figured out for the first time that both of these methods work by promoting the release of double-stranded RNA, or dsRNA, which spurs skin regeneration.

Why does it matter? The finding might help scientists develop more effective methods for treating skin damage — for instance, more careful combinations of laser rejuvenation and retinoic-acid treatment — and it also might point toward new ways to treat things like burn scars. “After a burn, humans don’t regenerate structures like hair follicles and sweat glands that used to be there,” said Luis Garza, a Johns Hopkins associate professor of dermatology. “It’s possible in light of these new findings that double-stranded RNA may be able to improve the appearance of burn scars.”

How does it work? Garza and his team were inspired by mice, which can regenerate hair follicles at the site of wounds. Earlier work by Garza et al. tied this regeneration to dsRNA, so he and his colleagues decided to see if human bodies, too, release dsRNA at the site of a wound, including the minor physical trauma caused by laser-rejuvenation treatments, which are widely known to work, though dermatologists haven’t completely understood why. To confirm that it had something to do with dsRNA, the team collected and analyzed skin biopsies from 17 middle-aged patients undergoing laser treatment at Johns Hopkins. Garza said, “It’s not an accident that laser rejuvenation and retinoic acid have both been successful treatments for premature aging of the skin from sun damage and other forms of exposure. They’re actually working in the same molecular pathways and nobody knew that until now.”

Fat Chance Against Cancer

A remarkable new drug delivery system disguises a common chemotherapy drug as a long-chain fatty acid. Thinking the drugs are tasty fats, tumors invite the drug inside — at that point, the targeted drug activates, acting to suppress tumor growth. Image credit: Nathan Gianneschi/Northwestern University.

What is it? Scientists at Northwestern University have designed a “Trojan horse” drug-delivery system that disguises itself as fat to get around cancer’s defense systems.

Why does it matter? Not only could the technique be more effective — it might be safer, too. In their tests, the Northwestern team found that they could use the Trojan horse to safely target tumors with a dose of the cancer drug paclitaxel that was 20 times bigger than usual. Project leader and Northwestern chemistry professor Nathan Gianneschi said, “Commonly used small-molecule drugs get into tumors — and other cells. They are toxic to tumors but also to humans. Hence, in general, these drugs have horrible side effects. Our goal is to increase the amount that gets into a tumor versus into other cells and tissues. That allows us to dose at much higher quantities without side effects, which kills the tumors faster.”

How does it work? According to the university, Gianneschi and colleagues “engineered a long-chain fatty acid with two binding sites — able to attach to drugs — on each end,” then hid the fat-drug combo inside human serum albumin, “which carries molecules, including fats, throughout the body.” Recognizing such devices as fats, hungry tumors let them in; that’s when the delivery system releases the cancer drug, which starts acting immediately. The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

When Audrey Hepburn went careening with Gregory Peck on a scooter through the cobbled streets of Rome in “Roman Holiday,” the Vespa she drove was simple enough that she could just jump on, twist the throttle and get to her destination — even if her execution was slightly inelegant for a princess.

Italian aerospace engineer and aviator Simone Castellani is working to similarly simplify the experience for pilots, albeit after they obtain a proper license. He is part of a GE team developing a digital brain for turboprop planes that will make flying them so easy “my mom could do it,” he  says. “Everything is done automatically. In a way, it is just like flying a scooter.”

The idea for the digital brain came from Brad Mottier, who runs GE Aviation’s Business and General Aviation unit. The technology, officially called Full Authority Digital Engine and Propeller Control, or FADEPC, is common in jets, but it has never been used in commercial turboprop planes. That’s because most Cessnas, Beechcrafts, Air Tractors and other aircraft in this category use engines based on designs that are several decades old. Using FADEPC on them wouldn’t be practical without other major changes. “The turboprop market has not gone through a major redesign in a long time,” Castellani says. “Using FADEPC on those engines would be like putting the most modern fuel controller on a car from 30 years ago.”

But things changed two years ago when Mottier asked his engineers to design a brand-new engine called Catalyst. The engine uses components originally developed for supersonic jet engines, 3D-printed parts, and, for the first time, FADEPC. “Everything is new on the Catalyst,” Castellani says. “Since we have designed this new engine from scratch, we felt this was the right engine for the technology.”

Both Castellani and Mottier are at the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh flying this week, the world’s largest airshow taking place every July in Wisconsin. GE Aviation brought a full-scale replica of the Catalyst engine there, including the FADEPC.

Above: Simone Castellani is part of a GE team developing a digital brain for turboprop planes. He says the technology will make flying them so easy “my mom could do it.” Image credit: Stefano Rostagno for GE Reports. Top: “Everything is done automatically,” Castellani says. “In a way, it is just like flying a scooter.” Castellani says. Image credit: Shutterstock.

Castellani has spent the last two decades working in China, the Czech Republic and elsewhere for Avio Aero, the Italian aviation powerhouse GE Aviation acquired in 2013. Today, he is based at the company’s headquarters just outside of Turin, the northern Italian industrial town steeped in engineering and the birthplace of Fiat cars. He loves to fly during his time off, and the technology he’s building could make his hobby more enjoyable.

Today, when Castellani flies a turboprop plane, he controls the power of the engine with one lever and the pitch of the propeller blades with another. He uses a manual that tells him the right settings for engine and propeller speeds, depending on altitude, temperature, efficiency and other conditions. To manage thrust, he has to set the engine power and the propeller speed independently, taking care not to exceed any of the engine limits. “I am a pilot, and I can tell you that flying a modern turboprop plane requires a lot of effort,” he says. “Most of the time, you are really watching the gauges in the cockpit instead of looking out.”

But the team’s FADEPC can do the same thing with just a single lever, just like twisting a scooter throttle. It’s a neat trick, but one that’s difficult to pull off. The system first ingests data from sensors monitoring parameters such as temperature, turbine speed, torque and pressure inside the engine. It combines that with external information about the ambient temperature, altitude and aircraft speed. It then uses smart algorithms to analyze the data and come up with the sweet spot allowing the engine to run in the most optimal way. “It’s simpler than driving an automatic car,” Castellani says. “You push the throttle, and the controller will tell the engine and propeller the best way to go.” Paul Corkery, the general manager for GE’s turboprop business, says that FADEPC “can make flying as simple as pushing a lever, and pilots love it. They have more time to fly the plane, look out of the window and take in the experience, instead of monitoring and adjusting the engine all the time.”

The engine not only excites pilots like Castellani, but also plane builders like Textron Aviation, whose new Cessna Denali will be the first plane to use the Catalyst. That’s because the technology helps reduce the Catalyst’s fuel burn by as much as 20 percent and gives the engine 10 percent more power compared with engines in its class. “It sounds simple, but it’s really disruptive,” says Cristian Lai, Castellani’s counterpart who helped write the code for the system.

The FADEPC team is spread out between Turin and the southern Italian town of Bari, where Avio Aero partnered with a local university and opened digital and additive manufacturing labs. They have filed for a dozen patents as a result of their work.

Lai’s and Castellani’s boss, Suzana Chakrokh, started pulling together the team that developed the system two years ago. Because the system involves software as well as hardware — the algorithms control the pitch of the propeller, the position of the fuel valves and other physical variables — she needed engineers with aerospace, electronics and mechanical engineering backgrounds. “But most of all, I wanted to have people with passion for the job,” she says. “I wanted people who really wanted to be working on it,” she says.

Castellani, Lai, and two dozen or so others that fit the description quickly plunged in. They watched the sun set behind the snowcapped Alps outside of their windows during many long days at their office. “Starting from zero is not easy,” Chakrokh says.

The team first ordered a blank electronic box built by the French aerospace company Safran to host the system. Next, they got to work writing software for controlling the Catalyst engine. The team used a model-based programming language for aerospace engineers that allowed them to convert the program to C, C+, Python “or whatever other language” we needed, Lai says. “The designers didn’t need to learn a specific language.”

Next, they uploaded the code and applications that control the engine into the box, kind of like loading a program into a new computer. “The box holds the operating system,” Chakrokh says. “We were writing the apps that will control the engine and the pitch of the blades.” The design is “double-redundant” and can quickly reconfigure itself if it detects a problem. “If this would happen, the pilots would see it on the dashboard, but otherwise they wouldn’t notice a thing,” Lai says.

The finished product, which is attached to the engine, weighs about 12 pounds and looks like a large laptop. GE successfully tested the full engine for the first time in December in Prague, the home of the company’s turboprop headquarters.

Castellani was there to see it run. “It’s a piece of art,” he says.

Cristian Lai (left) is testing the FADECPC system in an Avio Aero lab in Bari. Image credit: Yari Bovalino for GE Reports.

Looking back at his illustrious career in aviation, Paul Poberezny said that he “didn’t think there has been a single day since I was five years old when I didn’t say the word ‘airplane.’”

Poberezny, who was building and flying planes in high school and flew many different kinds of aircraft during World War II, in 1953 launched from the basement of his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Experimental Aircraft Association — the EAA. The same year, he invited flying enthusiasts and do-it-yourself airplane builders to show off their skills at the first EAA fly-in. It was a small affair that took place on the sidelines of a larger Milwaukee airshow, attracting just 22 planes and 150 visitors.

But it quickly grew. In 1969 the event, now called EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, found a permanent home at Wittman Regional Airport, whose runways stretch into the corn and grass fields just outside the Wisconsin town. The weeklong show, which takes place every July, has become a kind of Woodstock for pilots. “In the 1970s, it was predominantly a show for people who were building their own airplanes,” says Brad Mottier, who runs GE Aviation’s Business and General Aviation division. “The certified aircraft manufacturers, who now have a very large presence, fit inside a fairly small space.”

This week Oshkosh, as the event is known among pilots, is celebrating 50 years, and EAA organizers are expecting 700,000 visitors and more than 10,000 planes. These planes include small aircraft in the some of the strangest shapes, “Warbirds” — carefully restored vintage World War II-era planes — large passenger and cargo planes, helicopters, air tankers and the latest military fighter jets. Two years ago Jeff Bezos brought his Blue Origin rocket.

Mottier is a pilot — he owns a yellow Aviat Husky two-seater and a sleek Cessna Caravan — and has been flying to Oshkosh since he was a teenager. Like most pilots who come here, he spent many years camping out under the wing of his plane. “I must have been 18 when I first came to Oshkosh with my father in a Cessna 172, which can seat four people,” he said. “That was in the 1970s. The next year he bought a 1949 Navion and flew that plane down here for the first time. That was a miserable trip. It rained the whole time, there was standing water in the field and we ended up sleeping in the plane. But that was part of the fun.”

Top image: Brad Mottier on the way to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in the cockpit of his Cessna Caravan. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports. Above: The weeklong show, which takes place every July, has become a kind of Woodstock for pilots. “In the 1970s, it was predominantly a show for people who were building their own airplanes,” Mottier says. Now certified aircraft manufacturers have a very large presence. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

On Sunday, Mottier landed at Oshkosh in his Cessna Caravan — it’s a three-hour trip from Cincinnati, the headquarters of GE Aviation — and is staying in a hotel. He may not be sleeping in a tent, but he is still there to have fun. GE Aviation is feeling particularly festive this year — it is celebrating 100 years in business — and brought a full-scale model of the Catalyst, the first new turboprop engine designed from scratch in 30 years. Its designers used 3D printing to reduce the hundreds of complex engine parts to just a dozen or so. The approach enabled them to lower the engine’s weight and improve fuel consumption. The engine also features technology called full authority digital engine and propeller control, or FADEPC, which is common in jets but has never been used in commercial turboprop planes. Essentially the engine’s digital brain, the technology will allow pilots to control a plane with just a single lever, instead of three. FADEPC will make flying turboprop planes so easy that “my mom could do it,” according to GE’s Simone Castellani, an Italian aerospace engineer and aviator who helped develop the technology and is also in Oshkosh this year. “Everything is done automatically. In a way, it is just like flying a scooter.”

Several Catalyst engines are currently powering through tests in Europe. The first plane to use the engine will be Textron’s brand-new Cessna Denali.

The GE pavilion here also contains a working 3D printer for metals from Concept Laser, a German maker of 3D printers that is part of GE Additive, a business focusing on additive manufacturing. Concept Laser machines have been making parts for the Catalyst as well as for the GE9X, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine, and the GEnx, which powers many Boeing 787 Dreamliners, including a jet scheduled to make an appearance in Oshkosh this year.

But yet another aviation legend is celebrating its anniversary in Oshkosh this year: The iconic Boeing 747 is turning 50. GE didn’t produce engines for the first batch of 747s, but its workhorse CF6 engines soon took roost under their wings. Today, many jumbo jets in service are using them, including Air Force One and GE’s own Flying Test Bed. GE Aviation also developed the GEnx-2B engine for the latest generation of the plane, the 747-8.

Poberezny died in 2013. But his legacy keeps soaring.

Hybrid planes are moving closer to takeoff. At the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh airshow Tuesday, GE Aviation said it signed a deal with XTI Aircraft Company to use GE’s Catalyst engine as the core of a new hybrid-electric propulsion system for a planned XTI business aircraft, the TriFan 600. It’s the first step in what GE Aviation expects will be a journey that hopes to bring a new, differentiating product to the business and general aviation market.

“Hybridization enables distributed propulsion, where you have one turbine turning multiple propellers on an aircraft,” says Craig Hoover, GE Aviation’s hybrid-electric pursuits leader for its business and general aviation unit. That’s unlike traditional turboprop engines that need a separate turbine for every propeller. It allows more hybrid planes to have more propulsion sources, freeing plane designers to rethink even the basics of aircraft design.

“That enables a lot of applications, such as taking off vertically. That will be very disruptive for the industry when you don’t have to go to the airport to get on an aircraft,” adds Hoover.

Current battery technology doesn’t allow enough energy density to make a long-distance electric aircraft feasible, Hoover explains. Like hybrid cars, hybrid planes will combine the benefits of a turbine engine, such as the high-energy density of jet fuel, with those of electric ones, such as less maintenance and less noise.

Some believe the pace of electric and hybrid aircraft getting into service is expected to be quick. According to The Wall Street Journal, ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc. plans to begin air service using electric vertical-lift aircraft as soon as 2023. Other companies say electric planes could be on the market even sooner, in 2021, through widespread retrofitting of existing turboprop planes with new electric engines, the newspaper said. What’s unique about the TriFan 600 is that the Catalyst will allow the plane to travel much higher — 30,000 feet — and go faster than all electric planes entering the market. The power of the Catalyst will also allow transport of a much larger payload while still being able to take off and land vertically.

XTI Aircraft Company will use GE’s Catalyst engine as the core of a new hybrid-electric propulsion system for a planned XTI business plane, the TriFan 600. 3D printing enabled GE engineers to reduce the Catalyst’s weight by 5% and improve fuel consumption by 1%. Image credits: GE Aviation. 

Catalyst is the first turboprop engine to make it to the aviation market in more than 30 years that’s been designed completely from scratch. GE unveiled the engine in 2015 and has committed about $400 million to its development. The Catalyst’s “clean sheet” design means GE engineers have been able to take advantage of technological leaps the company has made in recent years with additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. With 3D printing, GE engineers have been able to distill down to just a dozen or so printed parts what typically would amount to some 800 components if they were made by conventional methods. The approach enabled them to reduce the Catalyst’s weight by 5% and improve fuel consumption by 1%. The engine for the TriFan will produce about 1,400 horsepower, or 1 megawatt of power.

The engine also sports a technology called full authority digital engine and propeller control (FADEPC), which is common in jets but has never been used in commercial turboprop planes. The technology will allow pilots to control a plane with just a single lever, instead of three in the traditional design — and four levers that would be needed with a hybrid engine. That simplifies the pilot’s job. Among the Catalyst’s other 98 patented technologies are advances that give it an industry-best 16:1 pressure ratio — an indicator of thrust — allowing the engine to extract better power at altitude, useful at the TriFan’s projected 30,000-foot cruising altitude.

In addition to improved performance and pilot operation, hybrid engines also free up airframers to radically rethink the design of planes. In the TriFan 600’s case, XTI has designed the craft to take off, hover and land vertically like a helicopter through the use of three ducted fans. The aircraft will then be able to rotate its two wing fans forward to operate like a plane, reaching cruising speed quickly. The TriFan 600 will carry five passengers plus its pilot, according to XTI. The plane already has 80 customer preorders.

In addition to the XTI TriFan 600, the Catalyst is also being used in Textron Aviation’s new luxury business aircraft, the Cessna Denali, a single-engine turboprop that is expected to be able to carry four passengers 1,600 nautical miles at a speed of 285 knots.

Says Hoover: “We see the Catalyst as being in the sweet spot from a power and altitude capability for where we see the turboprop market going with hybrid aircraft.”