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Airbus is to test a radical engine with visible fan blades as the world’s largest plane maker gears up to develop a successor for its best-selling A320 family of jets.
The European aerospace and defence group said test flights of a demonstrator of the “open fan” engine would take place on a modified A380 superjumbo towards the end of this decade.
The flights will inform an eventual decision on how best to power the next generation of single-aisle aircraft that will succeed the A320 aircraft when they come on the market towards the end of the 2030s.
Airbus hopes that the new engine configuration will contribute to an expected 20 to 30 per cent fuel efficiency improvement compared with existing models. Current types use “ducted fan” engines, where the fans are enclosed within a casing.
Bruno Fichefeux, Airbus’s head of future programmes, told a decarbonisation summit organised by the company in Toulouse that it had to make sure new technologies came to “maturity”. It would then “bet” its future designs on them.
“One of the major breakthroughs is the open fan technology,” Fichefeux said. “We need to bring this to maturity. We have a plan to perform flight tests.”
The proposed engine design is part of the global aviation industry’s moves towards making a net zero contribution to atmospheric carbon by 2050. The industry, which accounts for between 2 and 3 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, hopes to meet the goal through a mix of alternative fuels, new technologies and new aircraft designs, including longer and lighter wings.
Analysts have said any new single-aisle model will have to be 20 to 30 per cent more fuel-efficient than the current generation of aircraft. It should also be able to power itself using only sustainable aviation fuel. Such fuel can emit as much as 80 per cent less carbon dioxide over its life cycle than traditional aviation fuel.
Airbus is working with CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aerospace of the US and France’s Safran, on the open fan jet engine.
Mohamed Ali, chief technology and operations officer of GE Aerospace, told the Financial Times the companies were already working with regulators on issues around the new design. They included how to address higher noise levels from the open fan and any safety concerns.
Ali said the open fan would be very lightweight and rotate at speeds of about 1,000 revolutions per minute compared with up to 3,000 revolutions in current conventional engines. There would also be “shielding” on the aircraft to ensure it was reinforced in areas that could be susceptible to any damage from fan blades, he added.
Christian Scherer, head of Airbus’s plane-making division, said it was vital to test the open fan design because it had “more promising fuel consumption characteristics” than ducted fans.
The engines could be mounted either on the aircraft wing or at its rear.
Scherer said Airbus had not ruled out any configuration and was also in talks with Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney, CFM International’s main competitors, about what they could offer.
Airbus also used the event to reaffirm plans to develop a hydrogen-powered plane, but gave no new timeframe for launch. The company last month pushed back plans to launch a 100-seat aircraft by 2035.
The company said it would progress with plans to test a concept using hydrogen powered fuel cells.
Airbus chief executive Guillaume Faury defended the decision to push back the launch by saying the company wanted to avoid the risk of making a “Concorde of hydrogen” — a reference to the supersonic aircraft that was commercially unsuccessful.
Although Airbus would be able to develop and manufacture a hydrogen plane that worked, the company had concluded that in the immediate future the competitiveness of such a plane would “not be good enough”, Faury said.
“We would have the risk of a Concorde of hydrogen where we would have a solution that would not be a commercially viable solution at scale,” he added.
