March 15, 2023 - No. 011 In This Issue : VIDEO: FAA clears Boeing to resume deliveries of 787 Dreamliners : FAA issues directive to prevent Boeing 777 fuel tank explosions : Testing Of Rolls-Royce F130 Engines For The B-52 Bomber Has Begun : Daily Memo: Seeking Control To Offset Engine Supply Chain Struggles Sean Broderick February 09, 2023 : A simple check to see if your aircraft engine is manufacturing metal : Improving Aviation Sustainability through Parts Track and Trace : Air Plains Introduces 3-Point Primer for its Lycoming 180hp Engine STC FAA issues directive to prevent Boeing 777 fuel tank explosions BY RYTIS BERESNEVICIUS 2023-03-01 The United States (US) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a final rule Airworthiness Directive (AD), addressing a potential scenario where a fault current or a lightning strike could result in potential fuel tank explosions. Following the inspections of the fuel systems by Boeing, the FAA issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for all Boeing 777 models, requiring operators of the type to make changes to the aircraft’s fuel system. According to the AD, published on February 28, 2023, airlines flying any type of the 777 will need to install Teflon sleeves, cap sealing of fasteners, conduct detailed inspections, and impose corrective actions. “This AD also requires revising the existing maintenance or inspection program, as applicable, to incorporate more restrictive airworthiness limitations (AWLs),” read the directive. “The FAA is issuing this AD to address arcing inside the main and center fuel tanks in the event of a fault current or lightning strike, which, in combination with flammable fuel vapors, could result in a fuel tank explosion and consequent loss of the airplane,” added the FAA. In total, the regulator received eight comments from various stakeholders, including the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), airlines, and Boeing itself. While ALPA supported the NPRM without change, other parties provided feedback regarding the directive. Adopting as proposed to ensure air safety However, following the revision and response to the comments, the FAA ruled that “air safety requires adopting this AD as proposed”. Airlines, including Air France, American Airlines, Emirates, FedEx, KLM, United Airlines, and the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), Boeing, shared their views regarding the directive. For example, Air France, KLM, and United Airlines requested that the FAA mandate Boeing Alert Service Bulletin (SB) 777-57A0050, Revision 7, rather than Revision 6. That was because following the French airline’s discussions with the OEM, certain errors with the sixth revision would be corrected in the following SB. The FAA denied the motion, as “it is not known when Revision 7 will be available,” even if the agency is aware of the errors in Revision 6. Meanwhile, KLM specified that some technical details should not be included in the AD, because “it could possibly lead to confusion and mistakes by airline staff”. The FAA added additional information to clarify the location of the fasteners. FedEx asked the agency to add a section “Credit for Previous Action”, in order not to repeat actions required by previous SB Revisions. However, the FAA argued that actions carried out prior to the SB Revision 6 do not mean that airlines have already addressed the unsafe condition. Emirates requested that airlines could use alternatives to the Teflon sleeve, citing material shortages. For now, though, the agency does not allow the use of alternatives but will review them once Boeing or an operator submits an alternative method of compliance (AMOC) and will consider substitute materials “if sufficient data are submitted to substantiate that the change would provide an acceptable level of safety”. The AD affects 282 airplanes in the US, with a total cost of more than $14.05 million for all airlines. Per aircraft, the cost is up to $49,835, including $46,325 for labor and up to $3,510 for parts. Furthermore, the FAA noted that there could be additional costs to do the necessary corrective actions based on the inspections of the Boeing 777s. While the agency “has no way of determining the number of aircraft that might need these actions”, it estimated that the corrective actions would set back operators up to $5,720 per aircraft. The directive is effective April 4, 2023, and operators must adhere to the requirements identified in Boeing’s SB 777-57A0050, Revision 6, dated August 18, 2021, and carry out all applicable actions. Furthermore, carriers have 60 days after the effective date to adjust their maintenance and inspection programs, including the AWLs specified by this AD. FAA issues directive to prevent Boeing 777 fuel tank explosions Testing Of Rolls-Royce F130 Engines For The B-52 Bomber Has Begun March 1, 2023 Military Aviation DAVID CENCIOTTI Rolls-Royce has begun testing F130 engines for the United States Air Force B-52 fleet at the NASA Stennis Space Center. Rolls-Royce has announced it has launched F130 engine testing at the company’s outdoor test facility at the NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, U.S., on Mar. 1, 2023. The RR F130 engines were selected in 2021 to replace the bomber’s Pratt & Whitney TF33-PW-103s, used on the Stratofortress fleet since the 1960s. The TF-33 engine will no longer be supportable beyond 2030, so the B-52 Commercial Engine Replacement Program was kicked off in 2018, with GE Aviation, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce competing for the contract. The winning offer from Rolls-Royce is the military version of the BR725 engine used by the Gulfstream G650 business jet and already powering both the C-37 and E-11 BACN in service with the U.S. Air Force. According to Rolls-Royce, the testing announced today marks the first time F130 engines have been tested in the dual-pod engine configuration of the B-52 aircraft. The engine testing at NASA Stennis Space Center, that follows the wind tunnel testing of the new engine nacelles, will focus on crosswind aerodynamic flow as well as confirming the successful operation of the engine’s digital controls system. Early results from the testing have been very positive with additional test data to be analyzed over the next several months. The Air Force plans to finalize integration activities and deliver the first lot of B-52 modified aircraft in the 2026-2027 timeframe, with initial operational capability expected in 2030. The new engines are expected to remain on the B-52 for the reminder of the aircraft life, through at least 2050 increasing fuel efficiency and range, reducing emissions in unburned hydrocarbons, and significantly reducing maintenance costs. F130 engines will be manufactured, assembled and tested at Rolls-Royce facilities in Indianapolis, the company’s largest production facility in the U.S. The company has invested $1 Billion in recent years to completely modernize manufacturing and testing facilities in Indiana, as well as for advanced technology. Testing Of Rolls-Royce F130 Engines For The B-52 Bomber Has Begun Daily Memo: Seeking Control To Offset Engine Supply Chain Struggles Sean Broderick February 09, 2023 MTU Maintenance Serbia is one of the German engine specialist’s newest facilities. Opened in late 2022, its focus is parts repair—and it’s ramping up fast. The shop is adding capability at the rate of about one new part repair per day, MTU’s U.S. VP of Marketing and Sales Les Cronin said at the recent Aviation Week AeroEngines Americas conference. The venture is an example of what companies of all sizes are doing to help gain some control over their supply chains. In MTU’s case, Serbia is helping the company to bring some out-sourced work in-house and lessen its reliance on vendors struggling to keep up with demand. Engine supply chain pain was, unsurprisingly, the dominant theme at the AeroEngines event, held Feb. 7-9 in Dallas. While progress is evident, the gap between supply and demand—whether it’s new-engine deliveries, spare parts, or repairs—isn’t going away anytime soon. “Supply is growing at a very rapid rate, but demand is out-pacing it,” GE Aerospace Materials general manager Horatio Repetto said. “We’re going to have to work closely together in the next year or two plus to be well-coordinated on how we meet that demand.” Engine original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are particularly strained. On one side, they have been struggling to meet recent monthly production-rate targets at both Airbus and Boeing, and those rates are only going up. Meanwhile, operators working to meet demand for lift need to keep their in-service fleet flying—in many cases, aircraft and engines are being kept in service longer than expected to compensate for delivery delays. The result: surging demand for engine parts and repairs. Engine OEMs are boosting maintenance capacity. GE Aerospace added 1,300 people across its network of overhaul shops in 2022 and is gearing up for a 20% increase in engine shop visits in 2023, Repetto said. But the enginemakers can’t control demand. “It’s not about when the supply chain gets healthy,” he said. “It’s about when it catches up to demand.” Like MTU’s Serbia example, American Airlines took a different approach to one of its demand challenges by boosting internal capability. The carrier used the pandemic’s low activity period to improve its Tulsa, Oklahoma, engine overhaul facility. One result: a near-halving of in-average overhaul turnaround times for workhorse CFM56-5B and -7B engines to about 50 days. A more efficient shop means more capacity. After completing 30 heavy overhauls in 2019, the shop performed more than 100 in 2022, VP of technical services Mark Miner said. This year’s figure will be closer to 120. Smaller companies are taking similar steps. Used serviceable materials specialist Setna iO got a jump on the current used-parts demand trend by purchasing airframes and engines more than a year ago, said company head of commercial Hunter Edens. It soon found, however, that capacity for doing work needed to get usable components to market, such as engine teardowns and parts repairs, was strained. So, it invested in its own auxiliary power unit repair facility to help bring the in-demand components to market faster. Its next step: developing its own engine disassembly capability, which will get parts to end users—and money into its bank account—even faster. “The objective that we’re pursuing is trying to control as much of the front-end supply chain as possible,” Edens said. Daily Memo: Seeking Control To Offset Engine Supply Chain Struggles Sean Broderick February 09, 2023 A simple check to see if your aircraft engine is manufacturing metal By Paul McBride · February 23, 2023 Note: Graphic information included in original article. Question for Paul McBride, General Aviation News‘ engines expert: I have a Lycoming IO-540 engine with what Blackstone Laboratories says are consistently somewhat high metal readings. Someone I spoke with at Lycoming support awhile back told me the numbers are not really out of line. Can you give me Lycoming’s limits on Aluminum (Al), Iron (Fe), Chromium (Cr) and Copper (Cu)? Cu may be high due to AeroShell Oil Plus. I am going to plot the readings I have, but they all look stable, just a bit high. Carl Paul’s Answer: Carl, if you don’t mind, I’m going to use your question as an example of how difficult it is to provide a reasonable answer to a question like yours. This is all on me, but I believe once you understand where I’m coming from, it’ll give you — and hopefully other readers — a better starting point when asking technical questions, regardless of the product. The most important thing missing from your question is sufficient information so that I have some history of the engine involved. Providing information, such as specific engine model, specific engine serial number, and total time since new, remanufacture, or field overhaul, is very important. A short summary of the engine’s history, such as when the situation was discovered and whether or not it came following any recently completed maintenance, is also critical. As an example, I’ve seen complaints of metal contamination in the past that were discovered shortly after an engine was replaced due to a previous engine failure, only to learn that the previous engine failed because of metal contamination, but the oil cooler and attaching oil lines were never replaced (flushing doesn’t always work). Not smart, and the result was contamination of the replacement engine. Another important thing to relate is if you’ve had oil samples tested, have the samples been taken at the same number of operating hours consistently? Getting back to your basic question, I’d strongly recommend you plot the readings from several oil analysis reports you’ve gotten. The key to this type of situation is how the numbers come out after several samples have been tested. If all the numbers remain relatively constant, this is what we’re looking for. If from one sample to another Fe or Al has a sharp increase, then this is when we begin to become concerned. A sample oil analysis report on an aircraft engine from Blackstone Laboratories. If all of the samples have been taken consistently, and you see a sharp rise in some of the elements, I’d suggest you run the engine to the normal operating temperature and after shutting it down, drain the oil and take your sample at the mid-drain point. Check the engine oil filter and or the oil pressure screen and clean or replace the filter as required. Operate the engine for a period of about 10 hours and repeat. If the engine is manufacturing metal, this simple check will give you enough information to make a decision as to whether the engine actually does have a serious problem. Comparing samples over a period of time is the only way to really learn the condition of the engine. To my knowledge, Lycoming does not have any hard and fast numbers relating to how much is too much, because every situation is different. Again, the secret to analyzing oil samples is consistent readings. I apologize if I’ve been a bit rough on you Carl, but please understand that the more information you can provide up front regarding technical questions, the better the chance that you’ll get a good response. A simple check to see if your aircraft engine is manufacturing metal Improving Aviation Sustainability through Parts Track and Trace Chuck Marx Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at SkyThread March 4, 2023 Green is Good By Mark Roboff, CEO At SkyThread, we talk extensively about the benefits of part track and trace to our customers’ bottom line. Going back to what our Chief Strategy Officer, Chuck Marx, first articulated in Data for the Life of the Aircraft, we envision an industry data network supplying full and trusted visibility to any and every part’s history as providing more than $30B in yearly operational savings to the commercial aviation industry. There are indeed several vectors that contribute to this overall number, and the SkyThread team has done extensive work building a top down and bottoms up analysis to validate these savings. However, one vector animates me more than any other, and that’s track and trace’s impact to supply chain visibility. Most airlines will oversupply on spare parts, stuffing hubs and outstations with material that may sit on shelves for decades waiting for the off chance that they’ll be needed. Airlines do this because their visibility into part data when parts are needed most, such as a critical AOG event, is limited. Airlines need to trust that the parts they put on their planes are airworthy. It’s a safety-critical matter. When an airline’s ability to validate and trust part data is limited to just those parts that the airline directly buys, inventories, and manages, it leads to our oversupply problem. To illustrate, let’s imagine a major US airline has opened a route to northern Thailand, a tourist destination with many resorts that has been growing in popularity over the last decade. For the US airline, this route is clearly a remote outstation. They are the only US airline that flies to northern Thailand, and their nearest hub is on the US West Coast—say San Francisco or Seattle. Nevertheless, the destination itself is well served by other airlines in the region, and there are several sources of parts inventory stationed at the airport, waiting for that critical AOG event. Since this US airline has little insight into the history of parts they don’t directly own or manage, even if they may be willing to buy, sell, and trade with other companies, the airline buys and stations their own inventory of needed parts just for the one or two planes they fly to this remote destination. If the US airline had ways to evaluate, and critically, trust the technical and event history of other parts stationed at this remote destination, they could instead buy, sell, trade, or pool with the other parts owners at this station rather than fly and shelve their own parts for a rainy day. In short, an industry validated network of parts track and trace information provides a means for all players to trust the information about all parts, enabling an optimized just-in-time supply chain. With this expanded and trusted visibility, we estimate that the commercial aviation industry would be able to reduce parts inventory and carry by over 30%. That’s an enormous impact. What excites me most is not just the dollar savings impact on being able to reduce supply chain inventory. Reducing parts inventory by 30% has a substantial environmental impact as well. Imagine OEMs shifting production to needed parts rather than to parts that will sit on shelves for 15 years before they are eventually scrapped and recycled. Imagine the significant reduction in cargo volume when airlines can stop shipping a full array of spares to remote destinations, relying on trades and pools instead. Equating a measured impact—i.e., in carbon reduction—to this use-case is difficult but can be done with the right support from the right players. I strongly advocate that being able to measure the environmental impact on parts inventory reduction is a worthy task the industry should undertake with haste. The environmental impact on parts inventory reduction may be small compared to the moon shots we’re constantly talking about in aviation, particularly around next generation propulsion systems such as hybrid-electric or hydrogen, or with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). However, the fact is that the industry can act on parts track and trace and the resulting benefit of parts reduction today, and the industry can see a substantial outcome in just a few years. New propulsion systems and new fuel types are worthy goals, but we must recognize the nature of a moonshot. All these worthy efforts will take decades to materialize and scale, whereas the environmental benefits from parts inventory reduction can be realized today. For those parts that succeed in making it onto an aircraft, the next challenge is to manage the disposition of these parts at the aircraft end of life. The aircraft and engine decommissioning process has advanced tremendously over the past decade, with the ability now to even recycle the important carbon fibers that have replace the heavier metals and fasteners that composed the airframe in past generations. Both ICAO and IATA are both studying improvements and best practices in aircraft decommissioning. Airbus demonstrated a continuous commitment to sustainable dismantling practices when its partner company, Tarmac Aerosave, dismantled its 140th aircraft and now averages over 92% of an aircraft’s weight being re-used or recycled. SkyThread is entering this field to supply critical data. What determines whether a part is re-used or recycled is its economic value at that moment. The more we know about that part and its life history, the higher probability that the part will “live on” and reduce the need for the industry to build new spares. As we consider the continued investments made to make aviation’s future sustainable and eco-friendly, we should indeed see R&D on new propulsion systems and new fuels to their fruition, but we must not ignore the meaningful and transformational steps the industry can take to make an impact today. This is why parts track and trace is so exciting—in addition to making the industry more efficient and more resilient, it helps us move the needle on sustainability in the here and now. Let’s all take action to understand the quantifiable impact parts reduction can have on the environment, and then let’s move fast to make this a reality! For more information on our parts track and trace solution, SkyThread for Parts, please reach out to info@skythread.aero Improving Aviation Sustainability through Parts Track and Trace Air Plains Introduces 3-Point Primer for its Lycoming 180hp Engine STC Note: Graphical information is available in the original article. –Air Plains Services, a world leader in general aviation engine and avionics upgrades, has developed a new three-point engine primer kit for its 180hp engine upgrade STC, providing enhanced cold engine starts compared with the standard single-point primer. “Our new three-cylinder primer is particularly effective in cold-weather locations, but it gives anyone a smoother, quicker start,” said Katie Church, Air Plains president. “If you have an Air Plains 172XP 180hp upgrade that was done prior to 2021, it’s very likely the original primer system was reinstalled with the new engine. While the previous process works just fine for most customers, we wanted to develop an option that was even more reliable for cold-weather customers.” Air Plains engineers worked directly with Lycoming to develop the new primer system to be compatible with the more than 2,700 existing 172XP 180hp upgrades, and to be an option for new customers. Air Plains also worked with Lycoming to develop the installation manual. The standard primer uses a single nozzle in the #3 cylinder for priming while the new kit adds nozzles for cylinders #2 and #4. The new three-point primer is one of the new products to be featured by Air Plains at the annual Sun ‘N Fun Aerospace Expo in Lakeland, Fla., March 28 through April 2. Air Plains will be in a larger exhibit space this year- MD-23 - and will show off several customer airplanes featuring various Air Plains upgrades. For more information about any of Air Plains products or services, call 1-800-752-8481 or +1-620-326-8904, visit www.airplains.com. For online shopping, visit the Air Plains web store at https://shopairplains.com. Air Plains Introduces 3-Point Primer for its Lycoming 180hp Engine STC Curt Lewis