Skip to main content
×

GE.com has been updated to serve our three go-forward companies.

Please visit these standalone sites for more information

GE Aerospace | GE Vernova | GE HealthCare 

The GE Brief — July 25, 2019

July 25, 2019
"

July 25, 2019



WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE OSHKOSH


Heading out on her first date with the man she’d marry, Ashley Ringer chose her favorite mode of transportation: flying. (She piloted, he bought dinner.) En route to the wedding? She also flew. Recently Ringer, who’s now five months pregnant, gave a sealed envelope with ultrasound results to a fellow pilot, who let her in on the news via a pink exhaust trail behind his plane: It’s a girl! And just last week, she hopped in her trusty two-seat Cessna 140 to take the next Ringer — expected Nov. 11 — on an annual pilgrimage from her home in Ohio. “I’m not sticking out that far yet, so I don’t have to turn sideways,” Ringer said. And having already been on the pilgrimage eight or nine times — so many she’s lost count, anyway — Ringer knew she couldn’t miss EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, the legendary Wisconsin airshow.

Jet fuel in their veins: A lead engineer at GE Aviation in Dayton, Ohio, Ringer comes from a family of aviators. Her father, her grandfather, and possibly her great-grandfather all made the trek to Oshkosh, which has grown into the world’s largest airshow. Her father’s father flew seaplanes in World War II, and her father’s stepfather won awards from the Federal Aviation Administration. To say that aviation history and lore is steeped in Ringers’ blood is an understatement — but she’s also building aviation’s future, too. At GE in Dayton, Ringer oversees the design and manufacture of generators, those airborne power plants that use a plane’s jet engines to produce electricity. One of the machines from her plant is going in the planes flown by her brother Shawn, a distinguished pilot with the Air National Guard.

Will Ringer’s new daughter follow in the family tradition? She may not have a choice. Read more here about this long lineage of aviators — and what Oshkosh means to them.

 

JUST PLANE SIMPLE


Pilots at the wheel of large jets ... don’t actually use a wheel. Rather, they control their craft with a single lever. That’s something baked into the design of the big jets via a digital brain — called Full Authority Digital Engine Control, or FADEC — that simplifies the piloting experience. For decades, though, FADEC technology has been unavailable to smaller turboprop planes, like Cessnas and Beechcrafts. “I am a pilot, and I can tell you that flying a modern turboprop plane requires a lot of effort,” said Simone Castellani, an engineer at Italian aviation powerhouse Avio Aero, which GE Aviation acquired in 2013. “Most of the time, you are really watching the gauges in the cockpit instead of looking out.” But that’s changing, and Castellani — part of a GE team developing FADEC for turboprop engines — is at the forefront of the change. The goal? A flying experience so simple anyone could do it.

Do you have your pilot’s license? One reason FADEC hasn’t been available for turboprops is that those planes use engines whose designs are decades old. “Using FADEC [with integrated propeller control] on those engines would be like putting the most modern fuel controller on a car from 30 years ago,” Castellani said. That all changed when Brad Mottier, who runs GE Aviation’s Business and General Aviation unit, asked his engineers to design a new engine called the Catalyst — the first turboprop engine designed from scratch in five decades. Engineers used 3D printing to produce parts for the Catalyst that were unthinkable 50 years ago (see video below), and they outfitted the turboprop engine with — for the first time — FADEC — allowing pilots to control the craft with that one single, smart lever. “It’s a piece of art,” Castellani said.

Art though it may be, FADEC also reflects an almost bottomless well of tech know-how and innovation. Learn more here about its development.

 

CATALYST FOR CHANGE


Just like cars, airplanes are going hybrid, evolving into machines that combine the benefits of a turbine engine — namely, high energy density — with the perks of electricity, like less noise and maintenance. The technology is in place, and hybrid planes are primed for takeoff: The ride-hailing service Uber expects to begin service using electric vertical-lift aircraft as soon as 2023, though some experts think electric planes could hit the skies even sooner. And on Tuesday in Oshkosh, GE Aviation announced it had 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. The engine will generate up to 1 megawatt of power and help the TriFan 600 to fly higher and travel faster than all electric planes entering the market.

Starting from scratch: The Catalyst’s “clean sheet” design means GE engineers were able to take advantage of technological leaps the company has made in recent years. 3D printing, for instance, helped them take 855 conventionally made engine components and distill them down to just a dozen 3D-printed parts, reducing the engine’s weight and improving its fuel consumption. Hybridization, meanwhile, is enabling aircraft designers to radically rethink their planes: Whereas traditional turboprop planes need a separate turbine for each propeller, hybrid planes can take advantage of distributed propulsion — where one turbine generated electricity and feeds it to multiple propellers. “That enables a lot of applications, such as taking off vertically,” said GE Aviation’s Craig Hoover. “That will be very disruptive for the industry when you don’t have to go to the airport to get on an aircraft.”

Learn more here about how the Catalyst is powering the future of flight.

 

— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —




— QUOTE OF THE DAY —


“Everything is done automatically. In a way, it is just like flying a scooter.”


Simone Castellani, senior controls engineering manager at Avio Aero, a GE Aviation company.


 
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

ENJOY THIS NEWSLETTER?
Please send it to your friends and let them know they can subscribe here.

"