Wide-body aircraft

Lufthansa Technik (LHT) will establish a completions center in Asia, “sooner rather than later,” the company told an ABACE show press conference yesterday. “In the medium term the Chinese market is very interesting,” said Walter Heerdt, the company’s senior marketing and sales vice president. “We have to be here, otherwise we will not get the best share we can out of this market.”

Whatever other problems Qantas may have had as an early operator of the Airbus A380, it appears to be benefitting from a new approach to the potentially vexed task of managing spare parts supply.

With its Trent 1000 engines finally in commercial service on the delayed Boeing 787 platform, Rolls-Royce is stepping up efforts to advance further applications of the powerplant. It has started development of the Trent 1000C1 engine, also known as Pac C, that will be able to manage higher loads necessitated by the [787]-9 aircraft’s changed wing and thrust profiles. “It delivers 74,000 pounds of thrust at economic performance levels,” reported Trent 1000 project manager Simon Carlisle in a pre-show briefing.

Speaking to the Chinese media during his visit to Beijing last October, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Russia and China have much to gain from jointly developing a widebody airliner. He called for more joint Sino-Russian projects in space and aeronautics, as well as other high-technology spheres, stating that these may produce “huge economic effect for development of both countries.”