Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Addressing premature blade deterioration of Trent 1000s ranks as Rolls-Royce’s "single most important issue," acknowledges the aero engine company, which professes “deep regret” for the disruption to customer operations and the resulting groundings that cost the UK manufacturer some £430 million (about $540 million) last year.

 


Dominic Horwood, the company's civil-aerospace chief customer officer, called the "significant" disruption to customers "absolutely unacceptable to them and to us" and stressed the importance of providing support by returning engines to operators. Rolls-Royce added it has become "more responsive in turning engines around" and hopes to see single-digit numbers of aircraft on the ground (AOG) by the end of 2019.

 


Horwood said the company "respects" Air New Zealand's decision to choose General Electric GEnx powerplants for a new batch of Boeing 787-10s over the incumbent Trent 1000s that power its 787-9 fleet. "They are still an important customer to us,” he remarked. “The way we support customers is how we will be remembered.”

 


The official went to pains to emphasize that the blade-deterioration resulted from a design issue specific to the Trent 1000 at the "component level" and does not apply to other Trent-family variants. "We haven't seen these issues on earlier models [because it] comes down to detail design of this product," he explained.

 


Intermediate-pressure turbine issues have resulted from a sulfidation attack at the root of the blade, according to Horwood. Typically, a small "coating" or mark can cause local turbulence of the air and temperature around the blade.

 


Such situations can result, for example, from the atmosphere in regions where an engine has flown, knowledge of which can help a manufacturer understand how failures happen. Investigation of the issue has accelerated Rolls's understanding, but Horwood stressed a need for early detection. "The question is how to find such issues on the test bench, how to make the engine think it has been operating for years in, [say], Asia," he said.

 


Rolls-Royce civil aerospace marketing vice-president Richard Goodhead characterized the endeavor as a good example of "contextual awareness"–a key part of the manufacturer's "three Cs" philosophy alongside the need to be "connected" and "comprehending."

 


Horwood said the manufacturer, which claims good progress&nbsp;in introducing technical fixes, never stops learning. The lessons reside very much in detail design of components and an understanding of what can cause deterioration in service. “Once we have done that, then it is easy to apply on new engines,” he explained. "[This is] not about mistakes, but about applying lessons. [We are] already applying that learning in the UltraFan future-technology program.”

News and developments about aircraft engines, including turbofan, turboprop, turboshaft and piston.

Trent 1000 Fix Ranks as Top Priority for Rolls-Royce

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