By Alaynah Boyd

The only way to reach Saint Helena, a rugged volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic slightly larger than Manhattan, is by catching a five-day ride on the Royal Mail Ship St. Helena. The vessel visits the British territory about once every three weeks from Cape Town, but that timetable is about to change.

That’s because St. Helena, a place so remote that European powers permanently exiled Napoleon Bonaparte there in 1815, is finally getting an airport.

Top image: Both ends of the new airport’s runway plunge into the sea. Image credit: Avia Solutions Above: Napoleon. Image credit: Shutterstock

The airport will finally open the island’s doors to the world. When complete in 2016, the carrier Comair Limited will starts weekly flights Johannesburg, South Africa, with a brand-new Boeing 737-800.

The new air service will certainly benefit St. Helena’s 4,250 island residents – known as “Saints” – and their visiting relatives. But it could also boost tourism and attract Napoleon buffs. Today, just 1,200 visitors set foot on “on this cursed rock” – as Napoleon called it – every year. (Their number is limited by available ship berths and hotel rooms on the island.)

Napoleon called St. Helena “this cursed rock.” He died there on May 5, 1821. Image credit: Shutterstock

For new visitors, the excitement will start onboard of the plane. Landing at the new St. Helena airport will be analogous to landing on an aircraft carrier: a short runway in the middle of the ocean. Due to the island’s size and topography, the new airport’s runway will be just 1,550 meters long, with a steep drop-offs at each end.

One company that played a role in bringing passenger jets to Napoleon’s last exile was Avia Solutions, a division of GE Capital Aviation Services (GECAS). (It’s one of the GE Capital units that will remain part of GE after the company’s exit from banking.)

The British refurbished for Napoleon the Longwood House, the summer residence of St. Helena’s lieutenant governor. Napoleon lived there for six years, until his death in 1821. Image credit: Shutterstock

The local government hired Avia in 2013 to manage the procurement process for an airline to operate services in and out of St Helena. Cronan Enright, Avia’s head of airline consulting, says the project required solving a series of complex technical and market challenges.

For example, St. Helena is 1,200 miles from the nearest continent and the team looked at routes from 15 different locations in Brazil, Africa and Europe.

Napoleon’s tomb on St. Helena. His body was exhumed and moved to Paris in 1840. Image credit: Shutterstock

Johannesburg ended up on top since it is the busiest airport in Africa, offering the most connections and maximizing access to the island.

The GECAS team and airline operators also had to pick the best aircraft for the mission. “Given the projected number of weekly passengers in the early years, a smaller regional aircraft would have been most suitable,” Enright says. “However, given the four-and-a-half hour flight time from Johannesburg and the requirement to carry extra fuel, we decided to go with a bigger, longer-range narrow-body plane.”

Other technical constraints included daylight-only operating hours and the fact that the closest alternate runway: a military airport called Wideawake Airfield on Ascension Island, doesn’t allow commercial aircraft to come in.

As a result, pilots flying to St. Helena will have to carry sufficient fuel to allow for two hours of circling the island in a holding pattern, in addition to the fuel for the trip from Africa. “This was an exciting project to work on,” says Julian Cook, Avia’ principal consultant. “There are not that many destinations left in the world that are brand-new like St. Helena.”

The airport terminal during construction. Image credit. Avio Solutions

In addition to the new air service, St. Helena is also adding hotel rooms to accommodate the influx of tourists. A new 32-room hotel, expected to open in 2016, will increase the number of hotel beds on the island by half.

The first 737 should arrive in about a year, Cronan says. “This really was a once-in-a-lifetime assignment and a challenge for the Avia team to resolve,” he says. “It’s not every day that your work gets to connect an entire island to the rest of the world.”

If only Napoleon knew.

By GE Reports staff

The iconic shape of the light bulb has become the universal symbol for bright ideas ever since Thomas Edison patented the first one 135 years ago. But nothing lasts forever.

“Legislation phased out the incandescent light bulb last year, and its replacement, the compact fluorescent lamp, or CFL, has its days numbered,” says Tom Boyle, chief innovation manager for consumer light at GE Lighting. “Efficient LEDs are the next big thing and there’s no reason for them to be shaped like the lamps they replaced.”

Top: The usual suspects: The shape of the common light bulb stopped evolving almost a century ago. Image credit: GE Lighting Above: LED lights can be made in many shapes. Here a cylinder-shaped GE LED Bright Stik illuminates a work bench. Image credit: GE Lighting

Boyle says the classic pear - or “A-line” shape - of the light bulb was first handcrafted as a result of the glass blowing technique used to form the transparent shell. “Our first LED bulbs had that pear shape, too, but it was mainly for psychological reasons,” Boyle says. “People were used to it. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t better alternatives.”

The company just released a new LED light called “Bright Stik” designed to replace 60-watt CFLs. The slender bulb looks like a white oversize lipstick with a silver Edison screw base attached to the bottom. A pack of three will retail at Home Depot for less than $10.

“There are some 4 billion sockets in the U.S. and less than one-tenth have an LED screwed inside,” Boyle says. “This is a huge business opportunity. We believe that percentage will grow to 50 percent by the end of the decade.”

Glass blowers making early light bulbs. Image credit: GE Lighting

Engineer Nick Holonyak (below) invented the LED that emitted visible light in GE labs in 1963. The technology has seen some big advances over the last five years. Boyle says that LED efficiency increased by as much as 7 percent year over year for the past several years, allowing designers to shrink the bulb and shed large features like heat sinks and cooling fins. New technologies also helped cut the price tenfold since 2011, from $50 for a 60-watt equivalent LED bulb to less than $5 today.

GE says the bright stick was designed to last 15,000 hours, or 14 years if used for 3 hours per day. It needs 80 percent less energy than CFLs, gets bright instantly and doesn’t contain any mercury, a toxic heavy metal that requires special recycling.

Boyle says that GE tested 5 different designs for the new bulb before it settled on the stick. “We wanted something elegant and simple and there’s now no reason why you need to stick with the A-line,” he says. “The light distribution from both designs is basically identical and the stick is much easier to ship and store.”

Edison filed his patent application for a light bulb in 1879. It was granted in January 1880. Image credit: GE Lighting

The one thing that won’t change, though, is the Edison screw base at the bottom of the bulb. Edison invented it in his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., when he realized that in order to grow his light bulb business, he needed a simple and cost-effective way to replace bulbs. One evening in 1900, after a few failed attempts, he found inspiration inside the lid for a can of kerosene in his office. “This certainly can make a bang-up socket for the lamp, as well as the base,” he reportedly said.

That socket will soon be all that remains of his light bulb moment that changed the way we live a century ago.

Thomas Edison (right) invented many things, but the light bulb still shines the brightest. Image credit: GE Lighting

By Michael Keller

At the most fundamental level, we are all code. The typical human body is an assembly of some 37 trillion cells, and each holds all the information needed to make a complete human being.

Our DNA, the double-stranded helix responsible for heredity, contains 3 billion letters that dictate everything from hair and skin color to blood type. In fact, DNA is the most important identity document we will ever carry. Besides random mutations and damage, it doesn’t change from the day we’re born.

But that paradigm may soon start to shift. Scientists around the world have been experimenting with a powerful new tool called the CRISPR-Cas9 system, which has begun to open up the possibility of rewriting faulty or unwanted human, animal and plant DNA.

“We now have a way of easily making changes directly to the genome,” says Anja Smith, the research and development director at Dharmacon, a unit of GE Healthcare Life Sciencesdeveloping technologies for gene expression and editing, including CRISPR-Cas9. “You can now go directly into the cell itself and make changes to genes.”

Top image: A DNA illustration. Image credit: Getty Images. Above: An HIV virus attacking a cell. Image credit: Shutterstock

A Revolution in the making

Genetic engineering has advanced rapidly since the 1970s, when scientists first combined snips of DNA from one bacterium or virus with another. The genetic blueprints for life are almost entirely written in a seemingly simple language whose alphabet has just four letters, which stand for four different molecules called nucleic acids: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine and T for thymine.

Sequences of these letters spell out what we call genes, the basic units for inherited traits like blue eyes or the blood disorder hemophilia.

The ability to start reading that code, called DNA sequencing, took off in the 1970s and began accelerating in the 1980s. By 2003, scientists from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the private firm Celera Genomics announced they had sequenced the first essentially complete human genome.

If genetic engineering were a race, everything that preceded decoding the human genome was only a trip to the starting line.

After that, the tempo picked up quickly. There was the phenomenal discovery that allowed scientists to effectively stop genes from working, a process called RNA interference. This allowed researchers to start silencing targeted genes, turning them off to see what would happen and learn what they do. That led to a torrent of findings that started to reveal exactly which genes are associated with disorders ranging from cancers to neurodegenerative diseases. The technique won its discoverers, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, a Nobel Prize in 2006.

Along the way, researchers also began refining the difficult technique of inserting foreign DNA sequences into host genomes, getting the host cell to follow the foreign instructions and produce entirely foreign proteins. The finding allowed biopharmaceutical companies to create bacteria that could mass-produce the hormone insulin outside the human body.

In 2012, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna revealed the CRISPR-CAS9 system, which allows researchers to go deeper and precisely edit and fix individual genes. Their groundbreaking work has triggered the next revolution in genetic engineering.

An image of a bacteria. Image credit: Getty Images

A tailor with a pair of scissors, sewing needle and thread

In the early 2000s, biologists realized that bacteria and their microscopic cousins, archaea, had short sequences of letters that showed up over and over again in their own DNA. These came to be known as “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or CRISPRs.

It turned out that the sequence of letters between these CRISPRs were actually parts of foreign DNA from viruses, which had previously attacked the bacterium. After defeating the virus, the bacterium incorporated a piece of the invading DNA into its own to recognize the next time it was under attack.

This bacterial acquired immunity defense system was a clever cut-and-paste job. The scissors were the bacterium’s DNA-cutting protein called Cas9. The pasted bit included DNA information identifying the virus.

Scientists figured they could use this same system to target specific parts of any DNA to cut and splice in new sequences at precise locations. They’ve also learned how to use the system to silence genes, activate silenced genes, and to add in sequences for whole new functions.

So far, CRISPR-Cas9 has proven to be extremely versatile, effectively targeting, cutting and editing DNA in human cancer and stem cells, yeast, fish, rabbits, wheat, and other organisms. “If you design an RNA sequence that’s 20 letters long that corresponds to the part of the DNA you want to edit, you can direct the CRISPR-Cas9 system to make a double-strand break anywhere in DNA,” Smith says. “It’s an easy way to knock out genes to help understand what they do, but it also allows an easy way to create insertions that are very precise and could be used to treat disease. This discovery has totally reinvigorated the potential of gene therapy, and somebody is going to win a Nobel Prize for it.”

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DNA base pairs: Millions of pairs of just four nucleic acids- Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine - form the DNA. Image credit: Getty Images

The gene-editing technology is still being developed and businesses like Dharmacon are helping speed up the research process. The GE unit has recently released a product called Edit-R - editor, get it? - which drops from weeks to days the time it takes to build the genetic sequence the system uses to guide the Cas9 cutting protein to the exact spot along the target DNA. “We’re removing the steps that are required to save researchers time,” Smith says. “Edit-R is also more amenable to higher-throughput testing, which can be used to screen hundreds or thousands of genes at a time for biomedical research.”

Smith says rapid and accurate editing of genes opens up all sorts of research opportunities, from creating disease mutations for study to routes for new therapies against cancers, immune diseases and other ailments.

This gene-editing tool isn’t just expected to be useful against human disease; researchers plan to use it for improving crops and livestock and potentially even for projects like mosquito control. Revolutionary though CRISPR-Cas9 may be, such a powerful instrument to delete, insert or edit genes also comes with big ethical questions that are still being argued.

In April, Chinese scientists announced they had used the system to genetically alter human embryos for the first time. The revelation set off vigorous debate in scientific circles and among the general public. Should such powerful scientific tools be used to alter the DNA of a human before they are even born? If so, should that engineering be limited to fixing genetic mistakes that will lead to serious or fatal disorder, or can it be also used to augment people to have preferred traits?

Such concerns are still a ways off, but the case of the Chinese research is just the first in what will surely be more difficult questions now that genetic engineering is starting to look more like programming computer code.

“People are being very cautious about this,” Smith says. “It’s warranted. This is very new technology and we aren’t necessarily sure what editing one part of the DNA will do in another part of the cell. You’re targeting gene X, but are you accidentally also targeting gene Y and Z? The answer to this is still unknown.”

By GE Reports staff

A dozen people have walked on the moon and nearly 4,000 have stood on top of Mt. Everest. But only three humans have ventured the other way to Challenger Deep, the seabed’s deepest point. There, seven cold and dark miles below the surface, the water pressure feels like an entire elephant standing on your big toe.

The deep ocean is our planet’s last unexplored frontier. Water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that we have seen no more than 5 percent of the seafloor.

No wonder scientists and companies alike want to know more about this vast landscape rich in both life and resources. GE has recently teamed up with Vice to find out how we will map the sunken world.

The video is part of a nine-part YouTube series called the Invention Factory. It deals with subjects such as robot evolution, the future of flight, and the quest for eternal life. Take a look.

By Tomas Kellner

The hillsides around Tehachapi, a brown and blustery town on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert, are bristling with a forest of wind turbines of all makes and sizes.

But the tallest and strangest one stands down in the valley. It rises 450 feet from base to blade tips – almost half the height the Eiffel Tower – and has a large spinning silver aluminum dome bolted to its rotor. “It almost looks as if an UFO got stuck on the face,” says Mike Bowman, who leads sustainable energy projects at GE Global Research. “But the dome could be the future of wind.”

GE calls the experimental design the ecoROTR and the company started testing it here last month. If the experiments confirm wind tunnel data, the 20,000-pound dome could lead to larger and more efficient turbines for windy locations that are currently too hard to reach for the industry.

“As far as I know, there’s nothing like this in the world,” Bowman says. “This could be a game changer.”

The project is part of GE’s decade-long ecomagination initiative, focused on building machines with lower environmental impact that save customers money. Specifically, it will tackle two problems with wind turbines: first, they “waste” too much wind and aren’t as efficient as they could be. Second, the blades and towers are so big and heavy, they’re hard to ship to the remote places where the wind is best.

Styrofoam and toothpicks

The project started with a Styrofoam ball and a toothpick two years ago, when Mark Little, who runs GE Global Research, challenged his scientists to build a rotor that could harvest more wind. “He told the team to look for unexpected answers,” Bowman says. “You can’t just stretch out the blades. They are already too long and too difficult to ship.”

When the team came back, they proposed to give the turbine a big flat nose. “The design looked really strange, but it made a lot of sense,” Bowman says. “When wind hits the center of the wind turbine where the blades are attached, it’s wasted. That’s because the blades are basically levers and the same wind generates more force further from the hub.”

Bowman’s team thought that if they deflected the wasted wind from the hub, the blade tips could harvest its power. The nose could also allow them to build bigger rotors without lengthening the blades, since they could attach them to its perimeter.

The group decided to test the idea in a wind tunnel at GE’s lab in upstate New York. They sliced a small Styrofoam ball in half and attached it to the front of a small wind turbine model with a toothpick and glue. The team, which included engineers trained in computational flow dynamics, materials scientists, software engineers and other specialists, then ran multiple wind and smoke simulations inside the tunnel.

“When we crunched the numbers, we saw up to a 3 percent increase in performance,” Bowman says. “It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s potentially a lot when you apply the savings across an entire wind farm with dozens of turbines.”

From a scale model to 300-foot tower

The next step was to design a life-like ten-foot version of the turbine, which they took the model to the University of Stuttgart in Germany for more hard-core testing.

The team arrived with several different designs and measured their performance, loading, and multiple other parameters. The tests gave them clues into what an ultimate product could look like and how it would perform.

Back in the U.S., they used the test results to further validate the design of the full-scale version of the ecoROTR, which is now spinning in Tehachapi.

The team attached the experimental dome, which is 60 feet in diameter, to a 1.7-megawatt wind turbine, one of GE’s most powerful and tallest machines.

Like the dome, the 300-foot tower is a prototype. Instead of traditional steel tube towers, the “space-frame” tower design uses metal latticework wrapped in a polyester weave coat. The girders can be loaded inside shipping containers and onto ordinary trucks, and bolted together in places that were previously hard to reach.

The view from the top

Bowman has the lean and muscular build of an ultra-marathoner who can handle a 50-kilometer race through New York’s Adirondacks wilderness, and he brings the same kind of stamina to his work. Last week, he put on a safety harness and climbed a 300-foot ladder to the top of the turbine for the first time (see below). He inspected the dome and checked large silver Band-Aid-like patches covering a myriad of sensors measuring everything from torque to stress.

The sensors are everywhere, starting on the tower legs at the ground level, up to the turbine’s spinning shaft. The team regularly pores over the data, looking for signs that the experiment is working or needs to be tweaked. This phase of the project will last another four months.

“This is the pinnacle of wind power,” Bowman says.” I get the feeling ecoROTR and the space-frame tower could be the perfect couple.”

Image and GIF credits: Chris New/GE Reports

By David Lurie

GE said today it would sell its U.S. Sponsor Finance business for approximately $12 billion to Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The deal marks another big milestone on GE’s path to sell most of its banking businesses and return to industrials, a strategic shift the company announced in April.

“This announcement is the next step in GE’s transformation to a more focused industrial company,” said Keith Sherin, chairman and CEO of GE Capital. “The sale of Sponsor Finance aligns with our strategy to pair a smaller GE Capital with GE’s long-term industrial growth.”

GE had already agreed to sell GE Capital Real Estate assets for $26.5B.

The Sponsor Finance business is principally made up of Antares Capital, GE Capital’s lending business to private equity-backed middle market companies.

GE plans to sell most of its GE Capital assets over the next 18 months, a move that will reshape the company and further the role of its industrial businesses as the principal source of GE’s earnings.

GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said in April he wanted to “profoundly change the company” and “lead the next generation of industrial progress.”

GE estimates that by 2018, its industrial businesses will generate more than 90 percent of GE’s operating earnings, according to the CEO, up from 58 percent last year.

To date, GE Capital has announced sales of more than $55 billion and is moving toward the disposition of $100 billion by the end of of 2015.

The new transaction is subject to customary regulatory and other approvals. It is expected to close in the third quarter of 2015.

By Adam Tucker

It takes a tiny electric motor to vibrate all 4.55 ounces of an iPhone 6. But the engineers who are vibrating 80-pound gas turbine compressor blades to test their strength at GE’s component test laboratory in Greenville, SC, need a much bigger rig.

They bolt the blades to a heavy-duty table that vibrates faster than the eye can see. The setup subjects the blades to acceleration forces approaching 10 g, double what a racecar driver might experience when making a turn at a motorway.

The high-pitched whine in the video below, for example, is caused by a 20-inch blade made from a nickel super-alloy vibrating hard enough to displace the tip by up to a few inches for more than a million cycles.

Why is GE being so hard on this blade? Subjecting new components to extreme vibration helps designers make sure they will be able to handle extreme conditions.

Bert Stuck, general manager for GE’s power generation engineering component and development testing, says the test is meant to ensure that the part will be reliable in any situation a customer might experience.

Eventually, the team vibrates the blade to the point of failure. A pass in this test is equal to a break in the precise spot where engineers calculated it would be.

Vibration is just one of the many tests that Stuck’s team performs on newly designed components, before moving on to testing entire compressors and turbines.

(GE recently opened the world’s largest dedicated turbine test bed in Greenville. Since the test bed is not connected to the grid, it can do things to turbines that could otherwise destabilize or damage the power network.)

“We test [blades] to failure so we can determine what the design margins actually are, and make sure they match what we predicted,” Stuck says.

GE’s 9HA turbine is the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbine. It’s currently being tested in Greenville.

By Ki Mae Heussner

Over a decade ago, the Human Genome Project gave us the first blueprint of our genetic code, opening the door to a future where medical interventions could be personalized for each patient’s genetic composition. Today, programs like the Human Protein Atlas are zooming in even deeper, mapping out not just the DNA that defines our bodies, but also the building blocks – specifically, the proteins – that make them tick (or sick).

We’ve known for a while that human DNA holds about 20,000 human genes that code for proteins. But it was only late last year that scientists led by Mathias Uhlén of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, published the first comprehensive open-source map 17,000 human proteins, where they are, and how they function in the human body.

Uhlén and his team are now drilling deeper into the data and seeking to analyze the remaining proteins. Their work, aided by super-fast protein purification technology developed by GE Healthcare Life Sciences, could have broad implications, from improving the understanding of human tissue at the molecular level and to developing new diagnostic methods and treatments for cancer and other difficult-to-treat diseases.

“The protein is the work horse of the cell and the body,” Uhlén says. “We’ve provided for the first time to the scientific community a comprehensive list of all the proteins which are in the kidney, the brain and [other organs] so you get a descriptive view of the molecular constituents of each cell in the human body.”

Above: Human DNA is made from just four nucleic acids: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine. Top: Proteins like hemoglobin have extremely complex molecules.

In addition to creating a “periodic table” of the cellular building blocks, their work uncovered several findings related to the distribution of human proteins.

For example, the project has shown that almost half of all proteins are found in all tissues, while very few are unique to any one kind of tissue. That means, Uhlén says, that 30 percent of all drugs used today target proteins that are found in almost every cell in the human body.

“That’s, of course, very interesting and important for the pharmaceutical companies when they’re developing new drugs for new targets,” he says. “[They] can now go to the Protein Atlas and look at where these target proteins are in the human body.”

Beyond that, the Atlas could help advance personalized medicine by providing more information about biomarkers for different diseases. It could give medical researchers a better understanding of cancer since it includes samples from the 20 most common forms of the disease.

Uhlén his team started by identifying all of the 20,000 human genes that code for a protein and then cloning the genes in E.coli bacteria to produce the different proteins.

An illustration of E.coli bacteria. 

The next step involved using GE Healthcare’s ÄKTAexpress protein purification system, which allowed them to purify the individual proteins.

Once purified, Uhlén and team vaccinated animals with the proteins, causing them to make protein-specific antibodies that show up in different tissues and give away a protein’s location in the body. “Our system is a perfect fit for this type of study,” said Jill Simon, Global Product Manager for ÄKTAexpress at GE Healthcare.

Producing and purifying each protein can be a very time-intensive manual process. By using 14 GE Healthcare instruments, Simon and her team estimate GE helped save the Human Protein Atlas more than 23,000 hours – or 2.7 years – of manpower.

Antibodies (blue and yellow) attacking a cancer cell (red).

“This project would have been impossible if we didn’t have the fantastic instruments from GE Healthcare,” Uhlén says. “In order to do this, you need to automate different steps or it gets too expensive. Together with GE Healthcare, we developed an automated way of doing purification of the antibodies which is really working very well.”

Still, antibodies can be tricky to work with, Uhlén says. Sometimes, they help achieve good results, but other times they lead to false positives. Says Uhlén: “We want to clean that up in the next five or six years and, by 2020, have a complete map of where the proteins are in the human body.”

By GE Reports staff

The huge Paris Air Show starts at Le Bourget, just outside the French capital, this weekend. The world’s largest and longest-running aerospace trade gathering typically brings together the latest technology in civilian and military aviation and this year is no different: There will be new Airbus and Boeing passenger planes, the latest fighter jets, advanced jet engines and other airborne technology connected to the Industrial Internet.

Above: The first Paris airshow in 1909 included Bleriot and Hanriot monoplanes. Image credit: Wikimedia.  Top: CFM’s LEAP-1B attached to GE’s Boeing 747 flying test bed. Image credit: GE Reports.

French architect Andre Granet and aviation pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie launched the Paris air show in 1909. The very first exhibits included pioneering monoplanes by Rene Hanriot and Louis Bleriot. The latter had earlier that year become the first human to fly a plane across the English Channel.

The Paris Air Show in 2013. Image credit: Verrier.

Back then, Hanriot and Bleriot made their flying machines from ash wood, canvas and wire. Just over a century later, modern planes and engines are made with space-age composite materials and 3D printing.

CFM’s LEAP jet engines will have 19 3D-printed fuel nozzles like the one above. Image credit: GE Reports

GE will be in Paris, too. The company entered the aviation business in 1918, when engineer Sanford Moss converted a power plant turbine into a turbosupercharger for the nascent American air force. Engines and technologies made by GE and its partners like CFM International, a 50/50 joint-venture between GE and France’s Snecma (Safran), have since come to rule the skies. Their engines take off every 2 seconds somewhere in the world.

Sanford Moss tested the first turbosupercharger for aircraft engines on Pikes Peak in Colorado in 1918. Image credit: GE Reports

CFM’s first LEAP engines, each using 19, 3D-printed fuel nozzles and parts made from ultra-light and heat-resistant ceramic composite materials, are set to join the fleet in 2016. Those engines have already become the fastest selling engine family in CFM’s history and contribute to GE Aviation’s record $140 billion backlog (see the GE video below). CFM developed them for next-gen planes Airbus A320neo, Boeing 737MAX, and COMAC C919 for the fast-growing single-aisle aircraft market.

An Airbus A320neo powered by a pair of LEAP-1A engines took its maiden flight on May 19 in Toulouse, France. Image credit: Airbus

For the first time this year, GE Reports will be on the ground in Paris and reporting daily on the Air Show throughout the week. Be sure to check out our stories, photos, GIFs, and video. There will also be Periscope broadcasts and a Google Hangout with engineers working to connect jet engines to the Industrial Internet.

By GE Reports staff

The Paris Air Show starts this weekend and Boeing is bringing a brand new Dreamliner aircraft powered by a pair of GEnx engines. In preparation for the show, the plane just performed some heart-stopping acrobatics that hopefully none of us will ever have to experience during a routine flight, including what seems to be near-vertical lift off.

The GEnx (below) is GE’s most advanced commercial jet engine in service. It’s so powerful that five of them together can produce the same thrust at sea level as one Space Shuttle rocket engine

The GEnx is one of the world’s largest and most powerful jet engines. Image credit: GE/Adam Senatori

But the engine is also up to 15 percent more efficient than comparable GE engines, quieter, and generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions. In 2011, a Dreamliner equipped with the engine flew halfway around the world on a tank of gas, and then finished the job on the next tank.

The journey set a weight-class distance record for the 10,337-nautical-mile first leg, and also a record for the quickest-round-the-world flight for this class of plane: 42 hours and 27 minutes.

GIF and video credits: Boeing

By Tomas Kellner

A pilot  landing in Queenstown, the popular mountain resort in New Zealand, recently stuck a GoPro camera in his cockpit and recorded the last thrilling minutes of his flight. The video, which has since gone viral, shows the plane skirting jagged mountain peaks and piercing a thick blanket of clouds above the runway, before safely touching down.

The flight would be all but impossible if the pilot were not relying on a digital GPS-based navigation system, called Required Navigation Performance (RNP). It was first designed by Alaska Airlines pilot Steve Fulton (pictured above) and developed by GE Aviation.

Fulton, who now works for GE, knows Queenstown well. He served as the test director and rode in the jump seat with Qantas crews when GE rolled out the system at the airport in 2004. GE Reports managing editor Tomas Kellner talked to Fulton about the video, flying in the mountains, and the nerve-wracking night landings in Alaska that gave him the inspiration for RNP.

Tomas Kellner: Steve, what we are seeing in the video?

Steve Fulton: First of all, it’s an amazing video. I got all jazzed about it. What you are seeing is an airplane following precision guidance along a path that was engineered by GE Aviation. Precision guidance is a combination of path definition and guidance computers. The solid cloud cover with the mountain peaks sticking through make for dramatic viewing, but to the informed viewer, it tells another story. Prior to 2004, flights to or from Queenstown would not have been possible in these conditions. The flight in the video and many hundreds like it since 2004 were only made possible with technology that was pioneered by GE.

TK: What would happen on a day like this before RNP?

SF: Queenstown-bound flights would have been diverted, frequently to Invercargill, which is on the coast south of Queenstown. Passengers would then have to board a bus for a 2 hour 15 minute ride back north to Queenstown.

TK: Have you landed at the airport?

SF: Oh yeah. I led the GE Aviation team that opened up this airport to the technology. We signed the contract on Christmas Eve 2003. My first actual trip to Queenstown was in July 2004 to support the initial validation flights in the Qantas Boeing 737 with both the Australian and New Zealand regulators. Qantas began passenger flights to the airport September 4, 2004. I have on the wall in my GE office the navigation charts used by Qantas on the first flight. The charts are a special gift from the project pilot, Cpt. Alex Passerini.”

TK: You are still an Alaska Airline pilot and you’ve flown all over the world. How does Queenstown compare to other destinations?

SF: Those pictures from Queenstown actually look a lot like southeast Alaska. The RNP technology was developed by my team at Alaska Airlines in the early 1990s. It was approved by the FAA for passenger flights in Juneau, Alaska in 1996. That terrain, that scenario, that type of flying is a normal day of work for an Alaska Airlines pilot today at a number of airports in southeast Alaska.

TK: Tell me about those beginnings in Alaska. What was you inspiration?

SF: The inspiration was both frustration and concern. As pilots in southeast Alaska, we were regularly operating in difficult weather conditions with limited navigation aids. We understood that there was very little margin for error. We had training, experience, and the best in that generation of ground-based navigation equipment and the associated aircraft instrumentation. But still, even with all of that, there were times when a pilot could be put in a very tight spot.

TK: Can you give me an example?

SF: Imagine flying into Juneau, Alaska, at night in the early 1990s. Our aircraft was guided towards the airport by a radio beacon that lined us up on a course that was 15 degrees offset from the runway. At given distance intervals approaching the airport, we could descend the aircraft to prescribed altitudes, which we determined by the barometric altimeter. It was critical to not descend prematurely or below the given altitude as there were the Chilkat Mountains peaks in the darkness below you. In the previous 20 years, 120 lives had been lost in three separate aircraft accidents flying this same route to Juneau. We were well aware of this history.

TK: That sounds very stressful. You had no room for error.

SF: That’s just the beginning. The minimum altitude permissible for descent by instruments was 1,000 feet and contact with the approach lights had to be made at 3.4 miles from the airport in order to continue to a landing. The tricky part was that the last portion of the flight to the runway. It had to be done by using visual references, with the route essentially boxed in by high terrain close to the airport.

At that point we were limited to a minimum of 500 feet of altitude until safely through a notch in a ridge prior to the runway. Only then we could descend the final altitude to the runway while making the final 15 degree course change to line up with the runway.

TK: What if you missed?

SF: If a missed approach was required at any point along that last 90 seconds of visual flight to the runway, there was no published escape route. Each pilot had in their mind a plan, but for each of us it consisted of maximum go-around thrust in a climbing 180 degree, minimum radius turn in the darkness until safely above the terrain.

More than once I inadvertently descended into unseen clouds in the darkness and lost visual contact with the runway lights in this portion of the flight where visual contact was essential.

TK: How did you deal with it?

SF: This type of scenario put a lot of stress on a pilot. In Juneau with conditions producing scattered layers of cloud below 1,000 feet, particularly at night, I could feel the stress and a trickle of sweat down my armpits.

Juneau is the capital of Alaska and yet there are no roads to the outside. The community depended on airline service – it had to be reliable and safe and I knew we could make it better than it already was. That was the motivation for RNP. I was frustrated that sometimes we could not get in, which left the city isolated, sometimes for multiple days at a time when the clouds were low.

Fulton has in his GE office the RNP navigation charts used by Qantas on the first passenger flight to Queenstown. The charts were “as a very special gift from the project pilot, Cpt. Alex Passerini, in recognition of the huge accomplishment of this project,” Fulton says. The pilot in the video is flying a similar route.

TK: How did you solve the problem?

SF: I have a background in engineering and prior work experience developing and certifying aircraft avionics systems. I knew what modern airplanes were capable of and in the early 1990s. GPS was also just becoming available for use. With GPS, computers and electronic displays introduced into air transport aircraft in the early 1990s, the airplane performance had significantly outdistanced the existing navigation and operating rules that were set up in the 1940s and 1950s. You had a situation where an airplane was much more capable than what the system was recognizing.

TK: This seems like a good thing.

SF: That gap between actual capability and assumed capability represented unnecessary risk. It represented cost and it represented inconvenience to our passengers and the community. It also represented an environmental cost. We were burning more fuel and making a lot more noise than what we needed to. All those factors were motivators to me.

TK: How does the RNP system work?

SF: The GE Aviation Systems’ flight management computer on the Boeing 737 does the path computation and creates the lateral and vertical path guidance from a stored set of navigation data in an on-board database. The route design and navigation data is created by a team of experts at GE Aviation’s Flight Efficiency Services, which is currently the leading provider in the world for these products. GPS is an important enabler for this navigation technology, but there is a lot more going on.

GE engineers designed this “highway in the sky” approach to Queenstown.

TK: Can you let us inside the cockpit?

SF: There are essentially four basic functions in the aircraft cockpit that make this operation possible. The first is GPS. You have to know where you are in space, and GPS, unlike the ground beacons we had before, give us the ability to determine our position very precisely anywhere on the face of the planet without reference to any other system on the ground.

Then you have to define what path you want to fly and provide some reference to the centerline of that desired path. That path definition, in both lateral and vertical dimensions, is the second piece.
Thirdly, the flight crew needs to know where they are on that path. There is an electronic display in the airplane that’s like a moving map.

The last piece is guidance. Pilots need precise guidance so they can manage the progress of the flight within the specified performance of the route. They can do it manually or they can use the autopilot.

TK: About three minutes into the video you can see a big sunlit mountain emerge from the fog right in front of the plane. To an untrained observer, this seems pretty terrifying.

SF: You are right. People I’ve shown the video to have been quick to pick up on the scene you are talking about. There is a break in the cloud and you see this enormous mountain ahead and to the left. It kind of makes you go, wow, it must be something. But to me, I know that I have instruments inside the airplane integrating information from a variety of sources. I’ve got another view of that mountain on the heads-down digital map display. I know exactly where my desired path is, how the airplane is progressing along that path and that it is tracking nicely, and I can see where I am relative to that mountain.

TK: How do pilots respond to the system?

SF: It’s a pretty big departure of what we’ve had in the past in terms of style of flying. There’re multiple pieces of information the pilots have that confirm that they are on the correct path and that the airplane is performing properly, even though the view outside of the window looks kind of exciting.

But to answer your question, the pilots are well-trained, fully qualified and approved by regulators to fly these procedures. They respond to the system very favorably. Everybody understands that this is the right way to be flying. In the past we did not have the advantage of this type of precise flying. You really were guessing sometimes before this technology. It was an uncomfortable feeling.

TK: The pilot can always take control of the system, right?

SF: Yes, there is no question about that. The pilot is ultimately in command. You are responsible for monitoring the progress of the flight. If at any point along that flight things are not meeting the required performance, you take action and you take the airplane out of there safely. At every point along the approach path, there is a fully engineered safe extraction route available. It’s a comfortable feeling to know that you are not getting into a place where you feel like you are in a box. There is always an out.

TK: Early on you mentioned Qantas, the Australian national carrier, but Australia is pretty flat. What are the benefits of deploying RNP there and where else has GE installed RNP?

SF: Queenstown was the first RNP deployment in the south Pacific and one of the earliest projects for this group within GE Aviation. The terrain gave us an opportunity to demonstrate to the aviation stakeholders in that region how capable and intelligent these airplanes and operations are when we implement all of the provisions of the RNP procedures. Once they got comfortable with the operation in the difficult environments, they began to embrace the technology as an integral component of a larger airspace management system to improve efficiency and environmental performance in a more complex and crowded airspace.

“Everybody understands that this is the right way to be flying,” Fulton says. “In the past we did not have the advantage of this type of precise flying. You really were guessing sometimes before this technology. It was an uncomfortable feeling.”

TK: So RNP is not just about flying in the mountains. It’s also about fuel savings and efficient operations.

SF: That’s right. This is a typical pattern that we have seen repeated in numerous regions around the world. Since 2004, we have completed over three hundred of these route systems across Canada, New Zealand, Australia, China, Malaysia, Peru, Chile, Brazil, and the US. Most of the deployments are in areas where terrain is not a factor – the objectives are operational efficiency and to minimize the environmental impact of air traffic operation.

However, as this video illustrates so well, the projects in the mountainous regions attract a lot of attention. Many of the projects are quite interesting such as Lhasa, and other location in western and southwest China, as well as Rio’s downtown Santos Dumont airport, where you land right by scenic Sugarloaf Mountain.

TK: Are you going to be filming from the cockpit anytime soon?

SF: This video has been an inspiration for me to get my own GoPro camera and take some shots as I fly. Once in a while conditions are perfect to see some things which are truly amazing!

By Tomas Kellner

The sand storms in the Gobi Desert in Central Asia are some of the most frightening events nature can cook up, sending giant tan clouds of fine dust as far as Beijing. While locals seal their homes and try to keep the dust away, Gareth Richards, program manager for the next-generation LEAP jet engines at CFM International, can’t get enough of it.

His team is buying the dust and other troublesome dirt by the ton and blowing it inside jet engines. “We import dust and sand from all over the world,” says Richards while rolling an exhibit sample of the talcum powder-like substance between his fingers at the Paris Air Show. “It’s so harsh we use it to age our new engines seven years in the span of just three months.”

Above: A sample of Gobi Desert dust. Image credit: Adam Senatori/GE Reports. Top image: A hail test and GE’s jet engine testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. Image credit: CFM

This is important since his team has to understand how an engine is going to perform after years in service. “We need to get everything right early on,” Richards says. “We are guaranteeing the underlying maintenance costs per hour for years to come. This is a big deal.”

CFM built an entire technology room to explain the tests here at the Paris Air Show, which is held every two years in the French capital’s suburb of Le Bourget. The display includes the latest technologies that are being tested, such as parts made from special ceramic composites, 3D-printed fuel nozzles and nickel alloy compressor blades grown from a single crystal, but also the Gobi Desert dust and special sand that simulates the effects of volcanic ash.

CFM, the GE and Snecma (Safran) joint company that developed the LEAP engine, will have a lot of LEAPs to maintain. CFM President & CEO Jean-Paul Ebanga said in Paris on Saturday that the company has received 8,900 orders for the LEAP engine family valued at $124 billion (at list price), making it the best-selling engine in the company’s history. The first one is scheduled to enter service next year and by 2020, CFM will be shipping 1,800 LEAPs per year.

One of the most dramatic tests performed at Peebles involves testing for a “blade-out incident,” an event when a fan blade breaks and the fragments get sucked inside the engine. “It’s not pretty, but the engine casing must be strong enough to contain the debris and protect the aircraft,” Brian DeBruin, who runs testing at Peebles. Image credit: CFM

There are 30 engines on 15 test stands around the world, but the test plan calls for 60 engine builds going through some 40,000 cycles over the three-year testing run, which started in late 2013. “These engines are part of the most extensive ground and flight certification program in CFM’s history,” Ebanga says.

The LEAP will power new Airbus A320neo, Boeing 737MAX, and COMAC C919 planes. On May 19, a pair of LEAP-1A engines powered for the first time an Airbus A320neo. The plane has completed 23 flights and 75 flight hours as of last Friday without a hitch, according to Allen Paxson, CFM executive vice president.

LEAP cross-winds testing in Peebles. Image credit: CFM

The engine is like a big vacuum cleaner that sucks everything in front inside. Test engineers install a special rig a few feet from the fan and inject the dirt straight into the engine while it is running. It is similar to other ingestion tests that are putting water, hail and other foreign objects into the engine. “Dirt and dust is sometimes more difficult then other test as our new engines are very efficient at slinging material away from the core,” says Brian DeBruin, who run GE’s test operations site in Peebles, Ohio. “This has caused us to redesign the delivery system so we can achieve the test mission.”

LEAP icing testing in Winnipeg, Canada. Image credit: CFM

DeBruin says that the tests allow engineers to build robust engines that need less maintenance and stay on wing longer. “From these tests we learn changes to make or keep - for example, where the dirt collects and where it moves freely through the engine,” DeBruin says. “These tests also allow us to test new coatings that either protect the parent metal or help it to shed the dirt. Once we find promising coatings we then do additional tests in other conditions to ensure it will cover the range of full flight conditions.”

These are not the only harsh tests. To pass the “flocking bird test,” the engine must sustain the impact of seven birds at the same time. “The first three birds must strike within 10 percent of the nose cone for the test to count and they have to come in beak first,“ says CFM’s Paxson. "If they hit sideways, it invalidates the test.”

The LEAP flies on a GE test bed. Image credit: CFM

Another test involves shooting a slab of ice the size of a one-inch thick cutting board at the engine. The ice must remain whole until impact. It took the engineers 19 tries before they succeeded, Paxson says. Another test called the “triple redline test” pushes the engine to its limits: maximum speed of the fan, maximum speed of the core (the heart of the engine), and maximum temperature, all at the same time. “You would never see this in commercial service,” Paxson says.

Many of the most difficult tests have now been completed. CFM recently finished flying a LEAP-1A engine mounted on GE’s flying test bed made from a converted Boeing 747 in Alaska for natural icing tests. The test bed also allows the team to monitor the engine’s performance during high-G force turns and in-flight engine shut-downs and start-ups. To date, CFM has completed more than 50 flights and the engines have flown for more than 425 hours on GE’s two flying test beds.

Says Paxson: “The engines have accomplished what they were supposed to do.”

By Tomas Kellner

When Boeing released its viral video of the Vietnam Airlines Dreamliner performing stunning inflight maneuvers over Washington State on Thursday, the plane, which is powered by a pair of GEnx jet engines, was actually already parked on the tarmac in Le Bourget, the home of the biennial Paris Air Show. Photographer Adam Senatori got to take a good look at it over the weekend.

GIF credit: Boeing

The GEnx is up to 15 percent more efficient than comparable GE engines. It also generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions.

In 2011, a GEnx-powered Dreamliner flew halfway around the world on a tank of gas.

The GEnx jet engine is so powerful that five of them together can produce the same thrust at sea level as one Space Shuttle rocket engine.

GE makes two versions of the engine: the GEnx-1B for the Dreamliner and the GEnx-2B for Boeing’s 747-8 aircraft.

A view inside the engine.

Dreamliner image credits: Adam Senatori/GE Reports

By Tomas Kellner

Millions of viewers have watched on YouTube the skills of Boeing test pilots Randy Neville and Van Chaney at the controls of Vietnam Airlines’ new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner powered by a pair of GEnx engines. The plane landed in the French capital last week for the Paris Air Show and on Monday, when the show opened for business, they performed their awesome routine in real time above thousands of visitors. Photographer Adam Senatori captured some of the flight’s best moments.

Image credits: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

By Tomas Kellner

Mohammad Ehteshami has helped build the world’s largest and most powerful jet engines during his 31-year career at GE. But as a boy in a tiny desert village in Iran, odds were he would grow up farming pistachios. That is, until his mother intervened. I caught up with Ehteshami at the Paris Air Show, to talk about the latest jet engine technology.

Tomas Kellner: How did you end up running jet engine engineering at GE, arguably the world’s largest jet engine maker?

Mohammad Ehteshami: I grew up in a very small desert village in southeastern Iran. Even now it has only 98 people and 27 families. My mother was the only woman there who could read and write. She told me early on that by no means I would be farming pistachios like everyone else. She said: You go make planes.

TK: How did you respond to it?

ME: Well, you cannot argue with your mother. I started learning English, went to the U.S. consulate in the city of Shiraz and applied for a student visa. Back then we still had one. The visa came through and I went on to study mechanical engineering at University of Massachusetts, Boston in 1978.

Top: Mohammad Ehteshami stands in front of a Vietnam Airlines Dreamliner powered by a pair of GEnx jet engines at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori Above: Ehteshami(right) inside GE’s flying test bed. Image credit: GE Aviation

TK: It was your mother’s dream coming true.

ME: Well, not so fast. You have to understand that I had no money and Boston even then was very expensive. I had to find jobs to support myself. I was driving a taxi, and working in construction. But it was still hard to make ends meet. So I left the university and enrolled at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., which had a good engineering program and it was affordable. I liked engineering so much that after I got my degree, I went to the University of Cincinnati in Ohio to get my masters degree.

TK: Cincinnati is the home of GE Aviation. So now your mom’s dream was surely fulfilled.

ME: Not even. I actually held three jobs before I joined GE. That’s because I wasn’t looking for a job. I was looking for satisfaction. A few weeks after I joined GE, I told my wife that I found my place and that I’d either retire, get fired or die in this job, but I wasn’t quitting. Today I still tell her that I haven’t worked one day in my life. I’ve been having too much fun.

The GE90-115B is the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine. A pair of GE90 engines jet power a China Airlines Boeing 777 that arrived in  Paris for the Air Show. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

TK: What engines have you helped design?

ME: I’ve worked on big engines as well as small ones, like the one for the HondaJet. But nothing compares to the GE90 for Boeing’s 777 plane, which turned out to be the largest and most powerful jet engine in history. It was also the most demanding. This project made me a better man.

TK: How so?

ME: We were competing with Rolls Royce and Pratt & Whitney for the contract and at the same time introducing technologies that have never been tried in jet engines before, like fan blades made from carbon fiber composites. We also wanted to build an engine with architecture that could grow with the plane – which turned out to be a smart choice since our engines still power them.

We started in 1989 and were on a very tight deadline and there were many humbling moments. When you think that a test is going to go one way but the engine performed differently, I would feel it both technically and emotionally. I had to report the results the next day.

Ehteshami (fifth from right) in front the LEAP next-gen engine attached to GE’s flying test bed in Victorville, Calif. Image credit: GE Aviation

TK: Tell me about those tests.

ME: Take the composite blade. There are 22 of them in the large fan of the engine. Normally, they are made from metal, but composites, which are made from layers of carbon fiber and resin, are lighter. They allowed us to make the world’s largest jet engine fan, 128 inches in diameter. But these blades, for example, also have to take a large bird inside the engine and keep it operating safely. When we introduced the blade, people thought we were crazy. In their minds the technology wasn’t ready. But we pushed on, lost many nights of sleep, and got it done. The engine was certified in 1995 and today the GE90 engine is the only engine that powers new 777 planes.

TK: The GE90 was designed 20 years ago. What has happened to the technology since?

ME: We keep perfecting it. Where the GE90 has 22 blades, the GEnx, which we built for Dreamliner, has 18, and out latest engine in development, the GE9X, will have 16 blades, even though it will have the world’s largest fan with 11 feet in diameter. From bottom to top, that’s higher than a basketball hoop.

A China Airlines GE90 at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

TK: What plane will the GE9X go on?

ME: That engine will power Boeing’s next-generation 777X plane, the successor to the 777. But this time we are the sole engine supplier for the plane. This engine will be the most advanced engine in our portfolio. It will have parts made from ceramic matrix composites, 3D-printed components, and, of course, carbon fiber composite fan blades. No other manufacturer has carbon fiber composites blades in service and we are already on the fourth generation.

TK: A few years ago 3D printing was a futuristic technology and now it’s already inside flying engines. What will future engines look like?

ME: If you look out to 2025, it could be anything: from engines with open rotors to parts and materials that are hidden – like coatings – that will make engines more efficient. We will be building more efficient and more durable engines that will allow airlines to keep them on wing and keep flying.

TK: What about speed?

ME: Speed is a factor, but it has to make business sense. After all, we already had a supersonic plane, but it was expensive to operate.

TK: You are now effectively running all engineering at GE Aviation. Your mother must be proud.

ME: Well, I did bring her to Cincinnati and showed her the engines I worked on. But she said that they looked too heavy and that they weren’t a plane. In her mind, I am still not building planes.

Ehteshami with his mother and son in front of a GE90 engine at the GE Aviation museum in Evendale, Ohio.

By Tomas Kellner

Five GEnx engines together generate the same amount of thrust as the Space Shuttle’s rocket engine. The GIF above shows what that power looks like on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane, which uses a pair of the engines.

Once again on Tuesday, Boeing test pilots Randy Neville and Van Chaney performed again a near-vertical takeoff with the Vietnam Airlines’ 787-9 – an extended version of the Dreamliner – on Tuesday at the Paris Air Show.

Despite the seemingly vertical takeoff, what you see in the GIF and images is no extreme flying for Neville and Chaney. The test pilots are just cruising close to the edge of the jet’s testing envelope.

GE Reports is publishing the whole week from Paris. We will broadcast the Dreamliner’s next flight here on GE’s Periscope channel @general electric on Wednesday at 9:20 am eastern time. Tune in.

Image and GIF credits: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

By Tomas Kellner

The Boeing Dreamliner 787-9 and Airbus A350 XWB are currently perhaps the two most advanced passenger planes in the world.

They are both at the Paris Air Show, and they both carry GE technologies and advanced materials. The two GEnx engines that power the Dreamliner, for example, have fan blades and cases made from carbon fiber composites developed by GE engineers. The Airbus A350 has the trailing edges of its wings made from a similar advanced material made in a GE plant in the UK. In fact, more than a half that plane’s body is made from composites.

Both planes have been making afternoon flyovers this week at Paris Air Show. Photographer Adam Senatori captured some of the best moments.

Adam Senatori captured the A350 XWB (top) and the bird-like Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner (above) during flyovers above the Paris Air Show this week. Both planes feature GE materials and technology. Image credits: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

The A350 XWB over Paris. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

The Dreamliner in black & white. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

By Tomas Kellner

Building something new usually takes a lot of brains, effort and time. When GE decided to put blades made from untested carbon fiber composites inside a brand new jet engine and replace titanium with what was essentially plastic, it also required a lot of nerves.

“The design team woke up every morning thinking about it, and went to bed every night thinking about it,” says David Joyce, chief executive of GE Aviation. “It was such a radical change in design.”

Top: A GE90 engine on a brand new China Airlines Boeing 777. GIF credit: GE Reports /Adam Senatori. Above: In 1988, GE flew  to the Farnborough Air Show a plane powered by the GE36 unducted turbofan engine with composite blades. The engine didn’t take off, but the technology did. GIF credit: GE Reports

The bet, which took place 20 years ago, keeps paying off. The result was the GE90, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine. “It was an investment that wasn’t just for the GE90,“ Joyce said at the Paris Air Show this week.

GE’s next engine, the GEnx, used composites for fan blades and also, for the first time, for the fan casing.

Two GE90s in one shot: The first application of the blade technology was the GE90 engine built for Boeing 777. The engine was certified 20 years ago and GE is still building it for brand new 777 planes, like this China Airlines jet at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: Adam Senatori

The company is also applying this approach to the latest engines like the LEAP and the GE9X, sharing the newest technologies and materials such as ceramic matrix composites and 3D printing. “We have a really nice suite of technologies to sample,” he said.

The next engine with composites blades and also other parts was the GEnx. Here it’s powering the Vietnam Airlines Dreamliner over Paris during a routine that has since become a YouTube sensation. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

But GE Aviation is not the only business with access to this high-tech buffet. For example, its technologies have found applications in gas turbines for power generation. “We all share and leverage what scientists at our Global Research Centers develop,” Joyce said. “That’s the idea of the ‘GE store.’”

The The LEAP engine designed by CFM International, a 50/50 joint company set up by GE Aviation and France’s Safran (Snecma), is using woven carbon fiber blades developed by Snecma. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

LEAP engines will also have for the first time 3D-printed fuel nozzles (the round end above) and parts made from a breakthrough material called ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), which are both heat resistant and weigh much less than metal. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

But GE is not finished. The company is now developing the world’s largest engine, the GE9X for Boeing’s new 777X plane. It will include fourth generation fan blades, CMCs and 3D printed components. The engine was designed to use 10 percent less fuel than the world’s most powerful engine, the GE-115B. (GE Aviation’s Rick Kennedy in the video above has the details.)

For the first time in civilian aviation, GE is testing blades made from CMCs that could be used inside the GE9X. In the future, these blades, which GE unveiled at the Paris Air Show, could be also used to retrofit existing engines like the GEnx. CMCs are one third the weight of metal but withstand higher temperatures. This combination leads to lighter and more efficient jet engines. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

GE started testing fourth-generation carbon fiber composite blades for the GE9X. The blades are thinner, wider and longer than ever before. (The video below has more on the testing process.)

GE also started testing the engines advanced guts in Massa, Italy.

By Matt Benvie

The first jet engine used by the U.S. military was the result of a top secret project that took place in GE labs. Seven decades later, the Air Force is working with GE Aviation on the ultimate flying machine, and this time the partners are willing to talk about it. The “adaptive cycle” engine, as they call it, can automatically switch between the raw power of a fighter jet and slower, but more efficient flight desired by civilian airlines.

By marrying this adaptive architecture with a high-performance, heat-resistant core, this engine could achieve 10 percent higher thrust, 25 percent better fuel consumption, and 30 percent longer range, compared to the world’s most advanced military jet engines operating around the world today.

Top image: GE has been making jet engines for U.S. military since 1941, including the F110 engine for this F-16 that flew to the Paris Air Show from Aviano, Italy. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori. The adaptive cycle engine (above and below) could achieve 10 percent higher thrust, 25 percent better fuel consumption, and 30 percent longer range. Image credit: GE Reports

“To put it simply, the adaptive cycle engine is a new architecture that takes the best of a commercial engine and combines it with the best of a fighter engine,” says Jed Cox, who leads the Adaptive Versatile Engine Technology (ADVENT) project for the U.S. Air Force Research Lab. “So when I need high thrust, I can get high thrust. But when I don’t need high thrust, I can move into a super-fuel-efficient mode.” (See video below.)

Dave Jeffcoat, GE’s ADVENT project manager, says the design will “optimize the performance” of the engine for every part of the pilot’s mission. “We vary the pressure and bypass ratios mid-flight,” he says. “In takeoff conditions, the engine operates like a conventional fighter aircraft in a high-pressure ratio, low-bypass mode, allowing pilots to maximize thrust. But during cruise or loiter conditions, you don’t need that thrust, so we can transition to a high-bypass ratio, low-pressure ratio mode to be fuel efficient like a commercial engine. This adaptive feature of the design will deliver unprecedented performance capabilities to the Department of Defense,” he says.

The new design combines this “adaptability” with an additional source of air, called a “third stream of cooled air,” that can be used to further increase thrust, improve fuel efficiency, and dramatically reduce the amount of heat the aircraft has to handle.

That’s because the design, which was recently reviewed by propulsion experts from Lockheed Martin, Navy and NASA – in addition the Air Force and GE, includes the industry’s most expansive-ever use of heat-resistant materials called ceramic matrix composites, including the first rotating ceramic matrix composite parts in the turbine.

A turbine rotor with blades made from ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) after a test. The yellow blades are covered with an environmental barrier for experimental purposes. Image credit: GE Reports

“There have only been a few major leaps of this kind of change in the history of jet engine development,” says David Tweedie, manager of GE’s adaptive cycle engineering programs. “There was the leap from piston engines to turbojets, there was the leap from turbojets to turbofans. Now we’re making the leap from a conventional fixed cycle turbofan to a three-stream, adaptive cycle engine. We’re working with the Air Force to set the architecture and enabling technologies that will be critical to the warfighter for the next 20, 30, or 40 years.”

GE is also testing CMC blades inside commercial engines. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

Matt Meininger, the Air Force Research Lab’s manager of adaptive cycle programs such as ADVENT and AETD said his team was “very proud of the partnership we’ve established with GE. In this case, it has developed a significant amount of trust and respect in the relationship, so we end up with a better product that’s going to allow for better defense of our country.”

By Tomas Kellner

It was hard to miss a brand new Qatar Airlines Airbus A380 at the Paris Air Show this week. The world’s largest passenger plane, which has been certified to seat as many as 853 travelers, flew here directly from the Airbus assembly line in Toulouse.

The first Airbus A380 ever manufactured has been making flyovers at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

The Qatar double-decker carries four huge engines built by Engine Alliance, a joint venture between GE and Pratt & Whitney. The engines, called GP7200, combine the core of the world’s most powerfull engine, the GE90, and technology from Pratt’s PW4000 engine.

The middle part of the plane’s huge wings spanning 262 feet also features trailing edge parts made at GE Aviation’s plant in Hamble, UK.

Photographer Adam Senatori got a private tour of the jet. Take a look.

The video shows the upper deck of the plane. Starting in the first class section, Senatori moved through business class to the bar, and finished in economy class at the tail end of the plane.

The GP7200 engine and the flight deck of the brand new Qatar Airlines A380. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori.

The bar on the upper deck. GE Reports/Adam Senatori.

The first class section. GE Reports/Adam Senatori.

A mahogany table in first class. GE Reports/Adam Senatori.

The business class section. GE Reports/Adam Senatori.

In business class on the upper deck: GE Reports/Adam Senatori.