A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;in 2007, Curt came to&nbsp;the publication&nbsp;from the broadcast industry where he was a national science and technology television reporter and producer. He writes on the FBO field, aviation finance, and sustainable aviation and occasionally contributes to&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;sister publication&nbsp;Business Jet Traveler. Curt was a member of the AINtv reporting staff that won the 2008 Aerospace Journalist of the Year award for Best Airshow Daily. That same year, he was a finalist for another AJOYA award. He earned an AJOYA for Best Business Aviation Submission in 2018 and was a finalist in that category in 2021. He received the National Air Transportation Association’s&nbsp; Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with&nbsp;Consumer Reports’ television division, CRTV, and for several local television news staffs. An honors graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University in 1995. Curt lives in New York State with his wife and two young sons.

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Bombardier manufactures a variety of business aircraft models, provides engineering, and aircraft maintenance services.

Curt Epstein

GE Aerospace reached a milestone with the shipment of its 500th Passport engine. That unit also represents the first for the Bombardier Global 8000 that GE has shipped since it <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/2025-08-26/us-canada-okay-ge-passport-update-global-8000">received</a> FAA and Transport Canada authorization on the powerplant. EASA approval is pending.
Set to succeed the Global 7500 as Bombardier’s flagship, the Global 8000 is expected to be certified by year-end and will offer speeds of up to Mach 0.95 and a range of up to 8,000 nm.
The 19,000-pound-thrust Passport 20 powers both variants but was modified to enable the enhanced performance over the Global 7500’s 7,700-nm range and Mach 0.925 Mmo. GE executives have described the updates primarily as software alterations rather than “turbo-machinery” changes, unlocking potential already built into the engine.
This includes improving specific fuel consumption to enable the Global 8000’s longer range, which is also enabled by the upgrade of the ratings plug. “It literally is a plug with pins in it that you screw into the Fadec,” said Melvyn Heard, business aviation general manager for GE’s commercial engines and services business. “This, combined with the software update, gives you the capabilities for the engine to get the capability of a Global 8000.”
Going forward, all of the Passport engines will be configured thusly, and Bombardier will issue a service bulletin that will allow its Global 7500 customers to upgrade their engines to the 8000 standard.
Entering service in 2018, the Passport now equips more than 220 Global 7500s, the fastest business jet. The engine has amassed more than 600,000 hours in service, with 200,000 cycles and a 99.9% dispatch reliability. “It’s hard to believe even after being in service for almost 7 years now, we are still the most fuel-efficient engine in its class, even though new products have been certified, said Heard.
In AIN’s annual product support survey, the Passport scored highest among business jet engines this year, while its maker retained the top spot for product support.
“When you look at what we’ve done with this engine, we always envisioned that there would be greater capacity that the program would need,” Heard told AIN. “What we’ve been doing since we launched the program is make sure that capability was in there, so now we can take advantage of us overdelivering on fuel efficiency of the engine, having thrust capability in the engine, as well as the reliability that customers are looking for, and now all that has already been built in.”
GE assembles the Passport at its Lafayette, Indiana, facility alongside the commercial LEAP engine, and in terms of production, it is capable of meeting Bombardier’s needs from a capacity standpoint, according to Heard.
He noted that more than 75% of its engine customers are enrolled in its OnPoint maintenance services program, which monitors engine data to manage engine health. “Imagine a fleet of Passport engines out there streaming a terabyte of data at any point in time,” he stated.
“We can now gather insights from that data coming in and be able to push that back out to our customers to help them proactively manage their fleets. When we see an anomaly on one engine, we can understand if that is a unique thing that happened on that engine or if there’s something more fleetwide we need to go understand.”
This week at NBAA-BACE 2025, the engine maker is highlighting its FlightPulse&nbsp;subscription software application, which is now approaching 60,000 users, an increase of 156% since 2022. That number is expected to climb higher as new customers, such as NetJets, are onboarded.
Created by GE’s software as a service (SaaS) team, the app contains pre- and post-flight modules to inform a pilot’s experience through all stages of flight as part of their electronic flight bag. It gives pilots safety and fuel insights on their own flight data, as well as anonymized safety data sharing from across the industry.
“FlightPulse has become one of those ‘must-have’ apps, as more and more pilots recognize how insights from their own flight data can help them become better pilots,” said Andrew Coleman, president and general manager of GE’s SaaS division.

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