October 22, 2019
NETWORK NEWS
If you’re shopping for a new business jet and money’s no issue, you might call Bombardier. The plane maker’s latest luxury jet, the Global 7500, has been making headlines and setting records. Powered by a pair of Passport engines built by GE Aviation, the Global 7500 set a performance record in October by flying direct from Sydney to Detroit, some 8,225 nautical miles (9,465 miles) away. (See below.) But sleek looks, top-notch engineering and high speed are only part of the package: This plane’s also got smarts. In fact, the Global 7500 is the cornerstone of Bombardier’s plan to build a fleet of “fully connected aircraft” that bring to business aviation the same operational rigor and predictability common to commercial flight. GE Aviation can help there, too.
Link outside the box: This week at the NBAA Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition in Las Vegas, Bombardier and GE Aviation announced a plan to equip nearly 2,500 business jets with a smart system that brings owners, pilots and operators — along with service crews and suppliers like GE Aviation — inside a single “digital ecosystem.” For plane operators and owners, that’ll mean things like apps that help monitor fuel consumption and schedule service so it’s minimally disruptive. An important building block of the new system, called the Smart Link Plus box, includes powerful, lightweight airborne hardware consisting of a server about the size of a paperback book along with a fist-sized transmitter. “Think about an Apple Watch,” said Andrew Coleman, senior vice president at GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions unit. “It gives you advice every day on how many steps you took, what your heart rate was. We’re giving pilots this same level of visibility into how they fly.”
It’s a big job, but GE Aviation is up to it: The company is already helping large airlines like Qantas and AirAsia make the most of their data. Learn more here.
RECORDS COLLECTOR
As mentioned above, Bombardier’s Global 7500 recently set a record in business aviation history with a flight from Sydney to Detroit on a single tank of fuel — powered by a pair of GE Aviation’s Passport engines. It’s not the only mark of distinction the Global 7500 has garnered: In July, the plane became the largest purpose-built jet to operate from Saanen airport in Gstaad, the famous Swiss resort town with a famously short airport runway. “Since entry into service, the Global 7500 aircraft continues to go above and beyond expectations, flying farther and farther, setting new benchmarks for exceptional performance and comfort,” said Peter Likoray, Bombardier’s senior vice president for worldwide sales and marketing.
Faster and farther: There’s also the flight that the Global 7500 took from Los Angeles to New York this past March, making the trip in 3 hours and 54 minutes and sustaining a speed of 0.925 Mach — nearly the speed of sound — for more than two hours. That’s thanks to its sleek design and its Passport engines, which can generate 18,000 pounds of thrust. They’re a scaled-down version of the engine core developed for the CFM LEAP engine, a commercial machine powering ultra-efficient passenger jets like the Airbus A320neo family. CFM International, the 50-50 joint venture between GE Aviation and Safran Aircraft Engine that developed the LEAP engine, has received orders and commitments for more than 16,000 LEAP units valued at more than $236 billion.
Learn more here about the GE Aviation engine powering the MVP of the business-aviation world.
HAUL OF FAME
Late Friday in New York, some four dozen travelers boarded a flight operated by the Australian national carrier Qantas. They took their seats, the engines fired up, and the plane sped down the nighttime runway and lifted off into the air — where it stayed for almost 20 hours, crossing more than 10,000 miles of land and sea and 15 different time zones. By the time it touched down in Sydney, the world’s longest nonstop civilian flight had concluded. Though the plane was a regular Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, which can seat 236 passengers, it held only 49 passengers and crew — who were being closely monitored. “This is a science flight,” said Jim Leister, executive manager of the GE Aviation division that makes the GEnx engines, which powered the brand new plane. “The purpose is to study the effects of ultralong flight on passengers and flight crew.” That info will come in handy just a couple years down the road, when Qantas — which dubbed this endeavor Project Sunrise — plans to make these superlong flights a part of its regular offerings.
Sunrise and shine: The flight’s passengers, mostly Qantas employees and a handful of journalists and researchers, were outfitted with wearable technology monitoring their sleep patterns, brain waves and heart rates; pilots, meanwhile, wore EEG devices so researchers could monitor their alertness. The human cargo may need a little extra TLC on long flights, but the airplane and its engine pull it off with panache. Design using advanced materials like carbon fiber composites in its airframe and its GEnx engines increase the Dreamliner’s fuel efficiency relative to similarly sized jets with comparable engines. “We built the engine to be entirely flexible for 40-minute flights and 20-hour ones,” Leister said.
Qantas’ goal is to operate nonstop flights between Australia and New York and London starting in 2022 or 2023. Learn more here.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH
1. AI Gets A Grip
At San Francisco’s OpenAI, researchers trained a pair of neural networks to solve a Rubik’s Cube using just one five-fingered, humanlike hand.
2. The Slime Of Their Lives
Scientists at the Paris Zoological Park grew a slime mold that sounds like a character from Welcome to Night Vale: an organism neither plant nor (apparently) fungus nor animal. It can heal itself if cut in half, has more than 700 different sexes, and has a sort of spatial intelligence — despite lacking a brain.
3. Life On Mars?
The principal investigator in a 1970s NASA experiment to determine whether life exists on Mars revisits the project in a new article. Signs point to yes, he says.
Read more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“We're opening the doors of a whole new world where the airplane is in the palm of your hand, with all of the goodness that it will bring over the years in terms of our collective understanding of this product, this machine that we're operating.”
— Jean-Christophe Gallagher, vice president and general manager for customer experience at Bombardier
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Bombardier.
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