Speed and comfort are high on the list of business travelers, which is why France’s La Compagnie is operating a business-class-only daily flight between Newark Liberty Airport and Orly, two airports close to the business hubs of New York and Paris.
La Compagnie’s new Airbus A321neo jet isn’t a large plane as passenger jets go — it fits 76 reclining seats in its all-business class configuration — but when it arrived at the Paris Air Show on Tuesday, it heralded big changes in the industry.
On Monday afternoon at the Paris Air Show, jet engine maker CFM International said it signed the largest single jet engine order in history to supply fast-growing Indian carrier IndiGo with its LEAP-1A engines and services — a deal valued at more than $20 billion at list price.
The Paris Air Show kicked off this weekend with a briefing for journalists — or at least that’s how the jet engine maker CFM International got things going. To CFM, this year’s show is special. Eleven years ago, in 2008, the company announced in a hotel conference room just off the Avenue des Champs-Élysées that it would build a revolutionary new jet engine called the LEAP. Speaking in the same room on Saturday, Gaël Méheust, CFM's president and CEO, told reporters that the jet engine was “delivering on what we promised.”
Drinks in a cozy, elegant cocktail lounge have preceded plenty of marriage proposals. But perhaps only once has such a session led to the creation of the most prolific jet propulsion company in aviation history.
And yet, it happened — in April 1970 at the Ritz-Carlton lounge in Boston, where leaders of France’s government-owned Safran Aircraft Engines (known as Snecma until 2005) came to court GE. Back then, GE was still chiefly building jet engines for the military, and Pratt & Whitney dominated the burgeoning civilian market.
After examining the possibility of ceramics being used in flight in 2001, scientists from the Institute for Defense Analyses starkly concluded, “There may be more pigs flying than ceramics in the future.” It’s easy to see why when you think of a coffee mug: The material is great for handling heat but breaks catastrophically when met with force.
At the Greene County Career Center in southwestern Ohio’s Xenia Township, 650 high school students spend half their day in the classroom, learning traditional subjects like math, English and social studies. The other half of the day, though, is what gets them most excited.