FAA Awards GE Aviation Program to Demonstrate Reduced Fuel, Emissions, Noise

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GE Aviation received an award from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as part of the Continuous Lower Energy, Emissions and Noise (CLEEN) program. CLEEN is a joint FAA-industry program to accelerate the development and maturation of aircraft and engine technologies that reduce noise and emissions and improve fuel burn. The program is focused on developing technologies to meet NextGen environmental goals and to enable greater mobility. The goal is to enable the technologies to enter the fleet beginning in 2015. GE and the FAA will share the investment of up to $66 million for a five-year period.

“This is a great initiative with very tangible benefits for so many stakeholders: responsible growth of an essential industry, better asset utilization, lower fuel burn and cost for airlines, fewer delays for passengers, and lower emissions and noise for communities”

The CLEEN award will help fund three GE technologies including TAPS II Combustor, Open Rotor and Flight Management System - Air Traffic Management (FMS-ATM) technologies. The advanced FMS-ATM part of this award will enable commercial aircraft to routinely fly more optimum trajectories resulting in less fuel, emissions and noise.

"This is a great initiative with very tangible benefits for so many stakeholders: responsible growth of an essential industry, better asset utilization, lower fuel burn and cost for airlines, fewer delays for passengers, and lower emissions and noise for communities,” said Lorraine Bolsinger, president and CEO of GE Aviation Systems. “We are committed to bringing our customers savings now with proven products. GE’s FMS optimized descent is an ecomagination product that enables increased aircraft capacity along with a potential 5-15 percent fuel savings for our customers. Through work with our partners, we will be able to realize even greater savings.”

GE is working with industry partners Lockheed Martin, AirDat and Alaska Airlines. GE will develop advanced FMS functionality that will be installed on Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft to demonstrate the environmental benefits. Work with Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system, will demonstrate integration between the airborne FMS and the ground-based air traffic system.

“Lockheed Martin looks forward to being part of GE Aviation’s CLEEN solution aimed at reducing fuel, emissions and noise,” said Sandra Samuel, vice president of Lockheed Martin Transportation Solutions. “We will be maturing trajectory synchronization through integration of our proven air traffic management systems with the GE flight management system to enable more efficient flights. As a team, our work will enable industry to expedite current as well as future next generation air transportation advancements.”

GE will partner with Alaska Airlines to perform the demonstration flights for this five-year development program. Flight demonstrations in 2010 will set a baseline to measure fuel use, emissions and noise produced by commercial aircraft using current FMS-ATM technologies. Future test flights will test and measure the improvements made by the advanced technology features.

“As an industry leader in pioneering Next Generation technology like Required Navigation Performance, Alaska Airlines is proud to join in this effort that will modernize our flight management systems and have the added benefits of reducing fuel burn, emissions and aircraft noise while also improving our on-time reliability,” said Gary Beck, Alaska Airlines’ vice president of flight operations.

GE and AirDat will develop and demonstrate advanced technology to reduce the effects of weather on aircraft fuel consumption and emissions.

James Ladd, Chief Executive Officer of AirDat, commented, “We are pleased to be working with the FAA, GE and our other industry partners on this important CLEEN initiative. By installing our patented TAMDAR sensors on commercial aircraft, AirDat is able to gather, analyze and transmit highly accurate real-time weather data, including wind speeds and trajectory. This important data will enable aircraft participating in this demonstration to reduce their fuel consumption and environmental impact by optimizing their flight paths.”

The GE Global Research Center located in Niskayuna, New York will contribute advanced FMS-ATM trajectory synchronization and negotiation enabling technology developed under collaborative air traffic management research programs with Lockheed Martin.

GE Aviation, an operating unit of GE, is a world-leading provider of jet engines, components and integrated systems for commercial and military aircraft. GE Aviation has a global service network to support these offerings. GE Aviation Systems LLC and GE Aviation Systems Ltd are subsidiaries of GE. For more information, visit us at www.ge.com/aviation.

Notes to editors:

The CLEEN award will help fund three GE technologies:

TAPS II Combustor: GE is developing the TAPS II combustor for its new engine core, called eCore. eCore will be part of CFM International’s* new LEAP-X engine for narrow body aircraft as well as the new core for GE’s next generation regional and business jet engines. The new core will offer up to 16 percent better fuel efficiency than GE’s best engines in service today. GE began testing the TAPS II combustor in June 2009 at a special altitude test chamber in Evendale, Ohio, as part of the first eCore tests. The results were very positive. CLEEN funding will help advance dynamic modeling and size scaling of the TAPS II combustor.

Flight Management System (FMS) - Air Traffic Management (ATM): Advanced FMS-ATM technology will enable commercial aircraft to routinely fly more optimum trajectories resulting in less fuel, emissions and noise. The CLEEN award will include technology demonstrations with Lockheed Martin, AirDat and Alaska Airlines. The program will develop and demonstrate two primary components:

• Improvement to GE’s FMS trajectory algorithms for fuel, emissions and noise performance,
• Flight demonstrations of technology to enable a plane’s flight management system to digitally exchange critical flight information with the ERAM air traffic management system being developed and deployed in the U.S. by Lockheed Martin. Exchange of four-dimensional, trajectory-based flight information will allow aircraft to fly more direct approaches while maintaining a safe separation from other planes.

Open Rotor: Back in the 1980s, GE successfully ground tested and flew an open rotor or unducted fan engine, which offered significant fuel efficiency advantages over conventional ducted fan engines. By applying today’s advanced data acquisition systems and computational design tools to the open rotor engine, GE has improved the design to reduce fuel consumption by 26 percent and address noise challenges. Last year, GE started wind tunnel testing with NASA to evaluate counter-rotating fan systems for an open rotor engine. The CLEEN award will support blade aero-acoustic and pitch change mechanism research. Open rotor engine designs are among the longer-term technologies being evaluated for the LEAP-X engine.

*CFM International is a 50/50 joint company of GE and Snecma (Safran Group).