Rolls-Royce hit a massive milestone with its Trent XWB-84 engine program yesterday, as it delivered the 1,000th engine that has been built as part of the program. The Trent XWB is the only engine offered on the Airbus A350 program, meaning that Rolls-Royce has guaranteed engine sales when an A350 aircraft is sold.
While aircraft are composed of parts from many different suppliers, one that always stands out is the engine. As one of the more expensive parts of the plane, engines can be mixed and matched between aircraft of a single type, in the case of the XWB-84, this is the Airbus A350-900.
1,000 engines in six years
The Trent XWB-84 engine entered service alongside the Airbus A350-900 in 2015. Since then, the powerplant has become a top performer for Rolls-Royce and has actually become the fastest-selling large engine of all time.
According to the engine builder, the type has so far clocked more than eight million flying hours and is now in service with 30 operators around the world, from Aeroflot to World2Fly. The engine uses 15% less fuel than the first Trent engine and has a 99.9% dispatch reliability.
This week was a special week for Rolls-Royce as it hit another milestone in the XWB engine program. Earlier this year, in July, the company delivered its 1,000th XWB engine. Now it has gone one step further, delivering its 1,000th XWB-84 yesterday.
According to data from ch-aviation.com, 384 Airbus A350-900 aircraft have been delivered by Airbus, equating to 768 engines. You may be wondering why this is much lower than the 1,000 engines delivered by Rolls-Royce.
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The engine maker obviously delivers engines to Airbus before a plane is delivered, accounting for some of the deficit. Meanwhile, other engines may be floating about as replacements if an engine needs to be taken off of a plane for service. This allows the aircraft to continue flying in the meantime with a stand-in engine.
How are engine sales going?
Unfortunately, as aircraft deliveries were affected by the pandemic, engine deliveries have also been impacted. Catching up with Simple Flying at the recent Dubai Airshow, Ewan McDonald, Chief Customer Officer of Rolls-Royce, revealed,
“When COVID happened, the amount of engines we were producing halved near enough overnight. We’re very aligned [with Airbus and Boeing] about the recovery of those new deliveries, and a full recovery will not happen until 2024.”
Rolls-Royce only builds commercial aircraft engines for widebody jets. However, McDonald revealed to Simple Flying that demand for such engines rose as sustainability became a growing agenda within the industry. Airlines are increasingly looking to replace older inefficient aircraft with the latest generation of aircraft such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350.
What do you make of Rolls-Royce’s 1000th XWB-84 engine delivery? Let us know what you think and why in the comments!
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