More than a decade ago, Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc walked away from the market for single-aisle aircraft when it sold its stake in a venture making engines for the Airbus SE A320. Now the UK manufacturer is looking for ways to get back into the most widely flown segment of commercial aviation.
Rolls-Royce would be open to becoming a partner on single-aisle engine programs, said Rob Watson, who leads Rolls-Royce’s civil aerospace business. While there’s “always room” for such collaborations, teaming up with another engine maker depends on how the market develops, he said.
“Partnering will be really important for us whatever we do next,” Watson said. “It’s dependent on the time and the place and the moment in the market. We’re always scanning the horizon.”
Rolls-Royce is now focused on wide-body aircraft engines, such as the Trent XWB model that exclusively powers the Airbus A350, or the Trent 7000 on the Airbus A330neo. Until 2012, Rolls-Royce was part of the International Aero Engines consortium that made the V2500 engine for the A320 and some other aircraft, working with partners that included Pratt & Whitney, Japanese Aero Engines Corp., and German manufacturer MTU Aero Engines AG.
While Rolls-Royce continued to receive payments based on hours flown with the V2500 fleet, abandoning IAE closed the company out of the lucrative market for single-aisle jets. Pratt & Whitney, now owned by Raytheon Technologies Corp., went on to develop the PW1000G geared turbofan engine that’s now one of two options on the A320neo family, though the powerplant has been bedeviled by durability issues.
Rolls-Royce is working on a new engine concept called the UltraFan that promises to be more powerful as well as more fuel efficient. Watson said UltraFan could find its way into both widebody and narrowbody models, and some technology derived from the new platform will start flowing into the Trent XWB model in the next few years.
Watson, who took over in March as part of a management shakeup under new Chief Executive Officer Tufan Erginbilgic, was speaking last week in Dahlewitz near Berlin, where Rolls-Royce has made and tested aircraft engines for the past three decades. The executive said Rolls-Royce is preparing enhancement packages for the Trent 7000 as well as the Trent 1000, one of the engine choices for Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliner.
The turbine has “had its problems,” Watson said, but these are “largely recovered.” Rolls-Royce will seek to “protect and grow” its market share on the 787 that now stands at about a third of the fleet. General Electric dominates that program with its GEnx model.
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