Taking the Limelight: GE’s Engines Shine at EBACE

The most important private and business aviation event in Europe, EBACE 2023, was staged in the city of Geneva last month, gathering the industry's top players along with their latest developments and flagship products.

Among the flagship products on display were full-scale mockups of GE's Passport engine and the new Catalyst turboprop engine, a product of Avio Aero - a GE Aerospace company.

As a relatively new entrant to the business aviation space, the Passport engine is already making waves. With more than 250 engines in service, it has accumulated nearly 200,000 service hours since its introduction on Bombardiers Global 7500 in 2018. It has since also been named the powerplant for the new Bombardier Global 8000.

"The success of the GE Passport engine is in large part thanks to our commercial learnings which we applied to this product design," said Melvyn Heard, the business aviation product line leader for GE Aerospace. "The hugely successful CFM LEAP engine, which now has more than 20 million total hours, was leveraged to develop the core architecture and we expect to keep setting the pace for the business aviation market with this engine."

The game changing Catalyst is working to follow in those same footsteps as it progresses towards a service introduction on the Beechcraft Denali, by Textron. The Beechcraft Denali's flight test campaign is moving forward and has thus far carried out 700 flights and accumulated more than 1,300 hours in the air.

"We're very pleased with all the work put into designing this engine," says Chief Test Pilot, Dustin Smisor, confirmed expectations about flight progress and exciting performance reviews. "It's been extremely solid and reliable. Seeing its fuel efficiency, I've had to re-gauge myself because it doesn't burn a lot of fuel".

According to Smisor, the Catalyst and Denali are the perfect match.

"We as test pilots go well above and beyond what normal pilots go through," he added. "This includes testing in-flight shutdowns, rapid accelerations and decelerations of power, as well as extreme conditions."

Paul Corkery, Catalyst Program Leader at Avio Aero, also noted how much the technological innovation and the firsts encapsulated in the new engine.

"We are at about 72 percent with engine certification testing. So far we have assembled 26 engines and achieved more than 5,500 hours of operation - counting ground and flight tests." Corkery said, about the company's target for completion in 2024.

This is no small feat as the last clean sheet turboprop engine to be certified was more than 50 years ago, and a lot changed with the certification process since then.

"We're undertaking the most rigorous process ever faced by a turboprop engine and its single components, with several new regulatory requirements: such challenge relates also to the serial production ramp-up during years marked by major shocks running through the global supply chains and logistics" adds Corkery.

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