More Pratt GTF woes!

[OneHungLow]

One way to understand the effect of the shockwaves reverberating from Pratt & Whitney’s worsening geared turbofan engine woes is to look at MTU Aero Engines’ market capitalization. The Germany engine manufacturer is an 18% partner in the consortium that builds the PW1100G engine powering about 1,350 Airbus A320neo-family aircraft. MTU lost a quarter of its value—about $3 billion—in the two days following a Sept. 11 investor call by Pratt parent RTX outlining needed repairs to 3,000 PW1100G and V2500 engines.

MTU’s experience is symbolic because the Munich-based company is not directly responsible for its worst devaluation since it started trading as a public company nearly two decades ago. And it has plenty of company. The aftershocks are also hitting a good part of the Airbus A320neo operator base, sending airlines such as Wizz Air, IndiGo, Lufthansa, Spirit Airlines and Turkish Airlines scrambling to deal with fallout that will likely ground parts of their fleets through 2026.

Up to 650 Airbus A320ceo-family aircraft could be grounded in 2024.

For Pratt, there are immediate financial consequences. Longer term, it faces the risk of losing further market share on the Neo program to CFM International’s Leap 1A, which already has been selected by more operators. The durability issues that have been hampering the geared turbofan (GTF) for years have also led to a cooling of the Airbus-Pratt relationship. Airbus is known to be seriously considering CFM as a second engine provider for the A220 program if, as expected, it launches a stretched A220-500 (or A221).

In its Sept. 11 update, RTX revealed the extent of the issue by defining a “fleet management plan.” The plan is complicated, but can be put succinctly: It’s bad.

Some 3,000 engines, including PW1000Gs of all types and IAE V2500s, built from mid-2015 through mid-2021, may have parts with contaminated powder metal (PM). Cracking from PM contamination has been found in high-pressure turbine (HPT) Stage 1 and 2 disks, or hubs, installed in the motors. Pratt is also inspecting some high-pressure compressor (HPC) disks built at the same time, RTX revealed. Most of the affected engines are PW1100Gs found on A320neo-family aircraft.

Clogged engine overhaul shops and a fast-tracking of necessary inspections on higher-time PW1100G GTFs will likely drive repair turnaround times to up to as many as 300 days per engine and could ground 650 Airbus A320neos at one time early next year, RTX disclosed. According to Aviation Week Network’s Fleet Discovery database, 1,354 Pratt-powered A320neo-family aircraft are currently in service, parked, stored or in parked/reserve status.

Fleet groundings will “average” 350 at any given time through 2026, according to RTX President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Calio.

The effect on airline operations will be profound. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, who was in Washington for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Aerospace Summit in mid-September, used the opportunity to express his annoyance at the news, which caught most operators by surprise.

For Lufthansa, the accelerated GTF removals are expected to result in the grounding of 20 of its A320neos at “any given time next year,” Spohr said. In addition to extending the operation of existing Airbus A320ceo aircraft to offset grounded Neos, the carrier projects it will need to wet-lease an additional 40-50 aircraft next summer.

The PW1100G repairs hit an already stressed airline industry. “It used to be difficult to be a salesperson, and it used to be easy to be a procurement manager—now it’s the other way around,” Spohr quipped. “The supply side is a huge mess. . . . We could sell a lot more seats if there were more aircraft available.”

The same is true for Wizz Air, which has 49 affected aircraft and is slated to cut its planned capacity by 10% in the second half of 2024. Air New Zealand, which counts 16 A320/321neos in its fleet of 106 aircraft, is expecting that reduced engine availability will have a “significant impact” on its schedule starting in January.

IndiGo is the worst affected. The Indian low-cost carrier has 136 Neos built during the critical period. About 50 are already on the ground due to existing durability issues. The airline is urgently seeking as many A320ceos as possible on the secondhand market to battle further capacity shortfalls.

Affected airlines are also bristling over Airbus’ insistence that Pratt continue to deliver new PW1000G engines to its final assembly lines at the contractually agreed flow so that it can proceed with a planned production A320neo ramp-up. That leaves Pratt with scant room to come to the aid of airlines with large numbers of parked aircraft.

Read full article here...

[Boac]

Grief! That's serious. I haven't read all your post, but do we know if the defect came in from a sub-contractor or Pratt themselves?

[OneHungLow]

Grief! That's serious. I haven't read all your post, but do we know if the defect came in from a sub-contractor or Pratt themselves?

As I understand it the issue relates to microscopic contaminants found in a metal component of the Pratt GTF engine core, impacting around 1,200 engines that power Airbus A320neo jets.

It seems Pratt & Whitney may be on the line as the root cause of this issue, but as you can imagine nobody is admitting that yet!

Raytheon Technologies Corporation (RTX), the parent entity of trouble-plagued engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, disclosed in its second quarter results, released on July 25, that "a rare condition in powder metal used to manufacture certain engine parts" will require accelerated fleet inspection, impacting some 600 aircraft.

The problem affects PW1100G-JMs, better known as the GTF (geared turbofan) engine, manufactured between 2015 and 2020 for fitting to A320-200neo. It is understood approximately 1,200 engines will need to be removed from aircraft and inspected for micro-cracks potentially pointing to fatigue. RTX said recently discovered amounts of contamination were present in the metal used in the engine's high-pressure turbine discs.

"As a result, the business anticipates that a significant portion of the PW1100G-JM engine fleet, which powers the A320N, will require accelerated removals and inspections within the next nine to twelve months, including approximately 200 accelerated removals by mid-September of this year," the statement said. Engines on newly delivered aircraft are not impacted.

United States-based media outlets report Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Frontier Airlines, and JetBlue Airways as affected, but note that the airlines will not know how disruptive the engine checks will be to their networks until it is established how long the fix takes. RTX CEO Greg Hayes told the Wall Street Journal that he was made aware of the issue on July 14. “If we didn’t address this, there was risk out there,” he said. “You can imagine what the calls were like.” He also said early indications suggested that individual aircraft may be out of service for up to 60 days.

Airbus has approximately 6,700 A320neo on order, with delivery timelines running over many years. Reportedly, Pratt and Whitney GTF engines have been fitted to 45% of all A320neo manufactured since 2017, competing against the LEAP engine manufactured by CFM International. Hayes rejected the notion that the ongoing problems with their GTF engines are sending undecided engine customers to the competition, saying the "smart money" would stick with his company. He added that Pratt & Whitney would increase capacity at its 13 maintenance facilities worldwide and set aside engines currently coming off production line to use as spares in a bid to work through the inspections as quickly as possible.

https://www.ch-aviation.com/aircraft-data/32N

[PHXPhlyer]

Only flew a few A321 NEOs (Leap 1As) before i was fired just for having a birthday. Happy Birthday
When Airbus announced the NEO engine options I thought that the Pratt and Whitney GTF option would be the way to go.
Spirit was one of the first to teak delivery of GTF powered 320s. Every time we went through DFW there were at least 2 at a time parked without engines or with engines covered.
Glad I was wrong on that account.
Seems that the Indian operators were sold on GTF big time and it will bite them big time as well.

PP