Engines, wings and industrial capacity take center stage as suppliers ready for next-gen airliners

For years, Airbus and Boeing have been exploring technologies for their next single-aisle airliners, each of which would be a clean-sheet design. Now, they are moving closer to making decisions about engine configuration and more — the results of which could amount to the most significant leap in commercial aviation technology in a generation.

Airbus is targeting a 2030 launch for a successor to its bestselling A320 family, and Boeing continues to assess technologies for an aircraft that would replace the 737 MAX. At last week’s Farnborough International Airshow outside London, I spoke to executives from the planemakers and prospective engine suppliers about the status of these efforts.

“For us, the next couple years is about making sure that we get our finances ready, and we get the technology decisions made so that ultimately we’ll be positioned,” Boeing Chief Technology Officer Lane Ballard told reporters during a July 21 roundtable. “The time will be right, the market needs to be right, the customers obviously.”

He added: “We’ve got 6,800 planes in backlog; we’ve got to make sure that we get those into the hands of our customers while we focus on that next leap.”

Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury echoed that message during a July 21 media event on the sidelines of the show.

“We are not yet there,” Faury told reporters. “We are maturing technologies, but we have a roadmap that leads to being fully prepared for the launch in 2030 and the entry to service in the back end of the next decade.”

Aviation analytics firm Cirium predicts $3.4 trillion in aircraft deliveries through 2044, roughly 75% of which will be single-aisle airliners. As current technology reaches its limits in terms of fuel efficiency, the new jets are expected to require something different — whether that’s thin, high-performance wings or a radically different engine configuration.

“It’s incredibly important, because get this wrong and you’ve lost a decade,” said Sash Tusa, an aviation industry analyst at Agency Partners. “Maybe a bit less, but that’s a lot of sales.”

Engines

A key decision is which companies’ engines will be chosen to power the new aircraft, with CFM International and Pratt & Whitney both already in the single-aisle market and U.K. enginemaker Rolls-Royce vying to get back in.

Rolls-Royce CEO Tufan Erginbilgic expects Airbus and Boeing to make a decision on their engine suppliers “in two years,” he told reporters at Farnborough.

“Once they do the engine decision, you are either in or you are out,” he added.

Asked about Erginbilgic’s comments, an Airbus spokesman reiterated the 2030 target for announcing the next-generation single-aisle. He added: “We are currently maturing several technology bricks. These include engine configurations, including a possible open fan design, longer and thinner wings and more integrated automated systems.”

A Boeing spokesperson declined to comment, pointing to recent public remarks from CEO Kelly Ortberg that the new aircraft will be announced when the market is ready, Boeing’s technology is ready and the company is prepared financially.

For Rolls-Royce, selection by at least one of the planemakers is a must to meet its goal of rejoining the single-aisle market. The company is seeking U.K. government funding to further develop the UltraFan 30, a higher-bypass-ratio turbofan whose design was unveiled earlier this year.

Along with conventional turbofans, Airbus is assessing an open-fan configuration, in which the engine blades are not encased in a nacelle. Plans call for installing a CFM open-fan engine on an A380 test aircraft for flight tests before the end of the decade.

At a July 18 briefing in London before Farnborough commenced, CFM CEO Gaël Méheust reaffirmed the company remains “committed” to open fan to provide the step change in efficiency required for the next generation of engines. The joint venture of GE Aerospace and Safran is also looking at hybrid-electric propulsion and a compact core for improved cooling.

The longer Airbus and Boeing take to develop their airliners, the more plausible it is that hybrid-electric propulsion matures enough for such an engine to become a viable option, according to Agency Partners’ Tusa.

Just a few years ago, the required battery technology seemed a long way off. But on July 20, GE announced a flight milestone with BETA Technologies, the Vermont electric aircraft developer. The companies replaced one of the turboprop engines of a Saab 340 regional jet with a 1-megawatt hybrid-electric engine developed in collaboration with NASA and Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences, and flew the aircraft across the Atlantic above 30,000 feet.

That class of engine, GE said, is sufficient to power a single-aisle passenger airliner.

“Simulation has given way to real-world innovation,” GE Aerospace Commercial Engines CEO Mohamed Ali said in a press conference.

For Pratt & Whitney, the new aircraft represent an opportunity to expand its involvement with both planemakers.

“Our incentive is that we would think it’s a great opportunity to maybe get back into Boeing and continue partnering with Airbus,” President of Commercial Engines Rick Deurloo said at the company’s chalet on July 21. “That’s a hell of an incentive for us.”

Wings

Wings also made headlines at the show, with Airbus announcing it will flight-test its next-generation folding wingtips, designed to enable longer, higher-efficiency wings without exceeding standard airport gate dimensions. The company plans to design, build and flight-test several different configurations over the next three years.

The wingtips will be designed and built at Airbus’s Wing Technology Development Centre in Filton, England, before being transported to Toulouse, France, for installation on a single-aisle test aircraft. The hinge mechanism is to undergo ground testing, and the wingtips will be evaluated in flight in a fully extended position.

“Ultimately, all of this flight-test data that we will gather will be absolutely critical to de-risk the technology of folding wings in flight, but also to unlock the power and potential that long, high-aspect-ratio wings will have in the future,” said Richard MacPherson, technology lead on the project.

Wind tunnel testing is already underway, with flight trials scheduled to begin in the second half of 2027, a spokesperson said.

Boeing also expects future wings to be longer and thinner, Ballard said. Like Airbus, the company is considering folding wingtips, which already feature on the 777X design.

Industrial capacity

Amid the ongoing supplier evaluations, analysts noted Airbus and Boeing’s development timelines may be influenced by another consideration: factory floors.

“The timing of the next-generation platform will depend as much on industrial readiness as technological readiness,’’ John Schmidt, global head of aerospace and defense at Accenture, told me by email. He noted both planemakers “are still focused on stabilizing supply chain and meeting record demand, so any new program is likely to be triggered by confidence in the ecosystem’s capacity to execute at scale.”

During the Airbus media event, Faury said the company has worked to shore up its industrial capacity.

“Early 2018, we started to look at what would need to be done and how to structure the company to be prepared for the next generation of products,” he said. This includes an ongoing partnership with Dassault Systèmes meant to move the company toward “having the aircraft, the production system and the services in this digital environment.”

Boeing has been contending with manufacturing quality control issues on the 787 Dreamliner and lengthy delays to certifying the 777X. Ballard said industrial capacity is at the forefront of new aircraft planning, noting the company wants to ensure it can build the next jet at “historically high” rates, using more automation and potentially quantum computing.

He added that Boeing is looking for the optimal balance between aerodynamic performance and production efficiency.

“We’re going to find that sweet spot between what’s best for the performance in flight, what’s best for building at a very high rate, and we’re placing bets in both,” he said. “We just want to make sure, especially on the next commercial airplane, that we get it right and that our customers love it.”