Efficiency | the Net economy

A Short Flight for a Jet, A Giant Leap for a Jet Engine

GE – Over the last several weeks, crews at GE Aviation’s flight test base in Victorville, CA, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, installed a next-generation jet engine with ceramic components and 3-D printed parts to the wing of a modified Boeing 747, and readied it for its maiden flight.

The engine, called LEAP, successfully took to the skies on Monday (Oct 6).
(GE)
There are three versions of the jet engine: the LEAP-1A for the new Airbus 320neo passenger jets, the LEAP-1B for Boeing’s 737MAX aircraft, and the LEAP-1C for China’s COMAC C919 planes.

The LEAP is the bestselling family of jet engines in GE history. CFM has received more than $100 billion in orders (U.S. list price) from airlines like United, Air Asia, American Airlines and easyJet. They will use them on single-aisle aircraft, the fastest growing market in commercial aviation. more> http://tinyurl.com/qzqsbqj

Underdog Scientist Cracks Code to Reduce Flight Delays
(GE)
GE – Currently, the flight plans that set routes, speed and altitudes for passenger planes have one major flaw – it’s impossible to adjust them in real time during the flight. This means they can’t take account of constantly changing variables like wind, weather and airspace restraints. Jose Fonollosa’s algorithms use national airspace data from Flight Stats to determine in real time the most efficient flight paths, speeds and altitudes.

GE organized the competition in partnership with the open Big Data community Kaggle and Alaska Airlines. The companies challenged data scientists to develop algorithms that could improve flight efficiency and reduce the number of delays.

The winning model by Jose Fonollosa, a professor at the Signal Theory and Communications Department of Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña in Barcelona, Spain, turned out to be 12 percent more efficient when compared with data from actual flights. more> http://tinyurl.com/mdy8zue