Embraer E-Jet

Baltic’s Estonian Air (OV) will switch its Tallinn (TLL) flights from London Gatwick (LGW) to London City Airport (LCY) when it steps up services next year.

The Tallinn-based carrier will end its 2X-weekly TLL-LGW in October and replace it with a new service to LCY from March 1. Initially 3X-weekly, the service will ramp up to 4X-weekly in May, then go to 6X-weekly in June.

The new service will be tied to the arrival of OV’s new 112-seater Embraer E-190, which will operate the route. OV is due to receive two E-190s by mid-2013 (ATW Daily News, Feb. 9). The new aircraft will require some modifications to handle the steeper approach path into LCY, which has a short runway and high buildings.

Speaking at the World Low Cost Airline Congress in London, OV CEO Tero Taskila said, “There are several benefits for the airline. The turnaround time in LCY is 25 min. instead of 45 min. in LGW. That adds one hr. to aircraft utilization. We also have a good agreement with LCY, so the commercial conditions are better,” Taskila said.

The carrier made the switch because statistics showed the majority of passengers on the TLL-London sector terminated their journeys in LCY, which has faster access to the city center than LGW, OV spokeswoman Ilona Eskelinen added.

Most of OV’s passengers are business travelers and LCY is a heavily business-oriented airport, located close to the city’s Canary Wharf financial district.

OV will be the only carrier from Scandinavia and the Baltic flying into LCY.

Not all models will enjoy the same efficiency gain, however. The E175’s fuel burn will drop by 5 percent, while the E190’s consumption will fall by 3 percent. Embraer plans to introduce the improvements incrementally on new-build E-Jets, at a rate of “one percent next year and more in 2014,” Silva said. The company does expect to offer a retrofit.

Further improvements planned for next year include increased maintenance intervals, as well as structural and prognostics health management. Next, in 2015, Embraer plans unspecified “advanced avionics features” and a new cabin interior, the latter available as a retrofit.

Embraer’s E-Jet upgrade plan includes a wide-ranging series of
aerodynamic, structural and systems improvements, the bulk of which also
will be available for retrofit on the current E-Jet portfolio. Embraer,
which first revealed the initiative in late January when it announced
Republic Airways’ firm order for 47 E-175s, says the changes are part of
a continuous upgrade path it has been following since the first E-Jet
models entered service in 2004.
Packages will be introduced
through 2015, although “. . . there are other things that we are
considering for 2016/2017,” says Embraer Commercial Aviation Market
Intelligence VP Claudio Camelier.
The initial element is a fuel
burn improvement package along with a series of maintenance updates, all
of which are being introduced this year.
The first fuel burn
package includes a series of aerodynamic “clean-up” features to reduce
drag, along with optimization of the environmental control (ECS) and
anti-ice systems, to reduce excessive use of engine bleed air. The
aero-package includes fillers to close drag-causing gaps in the
horizontal tail, a revised rain deflector over the cabin doors, improved
ram air doors in the lower fuselage and low-drag wheel fairings.

This package, which builds on updates developed for the larger
E-190/195 family, is already incorporated in new aircraft delivered from
January 2013.
A second fuel burn reduction package, based on
further aerodynamic clean-ups of the auxiliary power unit inlet and
anti-collision beacon as well as an all-new wingtip, will begin flight
tests in the second quarter. The new wingtip extends overall span by
around 9 ft. to 94 ft. 2 in., and replaces the existing vertical
winglet. The larger tip, which is angled with a dihedral of 45 deg.,
imposes added bending load to the wing and is therefore accompanied by
local strengthening to the wing box, skins and stub wing where the unit
attaches to the fuselage.
The added low-drag features will be
incorporated from 2014 onward, as will the first new wingtips, which
enter service that year on the E-175. The extended tip follows on the
E-190 and E-170 in 2015 and in 2016 on the E-195.
“The design has
been evaluated in the wind tunnel at transonic and subsonic conditions
which validated computational fluid dynamics simulations. We’ve also
evaluated all the low-speed characteristics, and the wind tunnel tests
have given us a high degree of confidence that the flight tests will
confirm these results,” says Camelier.
Combined, all the updates
are expected to give a 5% fuel burn benefit to the E-170 based on a 600
nm flight, while the biggest beneficiary is expected to be the E-175,
which could see fuel burn improve by as much as 5.5%. As the E-190 and
E-195 already have some of the drag reduction features, these will see
improvements of 3.5% and 4%, respectively.
The updates also
include a series of systems and avionics upgrades to lower maintenance
costs, improve reliability and optimize navigation performance. They
include longer-life LED external lights, and a revised maintenance plan
that extends the basic check interval from 6,000 flight hours to 7,500.
The extension is “based on data from experience over about 10 years, and
saves the equivalent of one basic check per aircraft over around that
period” says Commercial Aviation Programs VP Leandro Laia.
To
further reduce operating costs, Embraer’s upgrade plan also includes
installation of a prognostic health management system to monitor
equipment and anticipate failures or malfunctions. “The idea is to
transform an unscheduled maintenance event into a planned maintenance
event with less downtime and less interruption to the flight schedule,”
says Camelier, who adds that the system will be available from December
2014.
The following year, Embraer also plans to introduce a
scheduled structural health monitoring (SHM) system that involves the
installation of fatigue and corrosion sensors in hard-to-access areas of
the airframe around the aft doors. “To conduct a visual structural
inspection you have to remove the galleys, lavatory, seats, liners and
so on, but with the SHM you have electronic sensors that provide the
data,” says Camelier. Embraer estimates the SHM will reduce the time for
inspections by 128 worker hours.
Larger overhead bins in the cabin and a wireless inflight entertainment system also are due to be introduced from 2015.

Embraer executives provided more details on 12 September about new wingtips and other airflow improvements that the company says will generate fuel burn savings of up to 5% on its current generation E-Jets.

The new wingtips, which will be installed on the manufacturer's Embraer 175s next year, are longer than wingtips on Embraer's current aircraft and extend from the wing at a shallower angle, resembling the outer wing of Boeing's 787 aircraft.

"It's almost a continuation of the wing," says Luis Carlos Affonso, Embraer's chief operating officer of the commercial aviation division, during a meeting with reporters at the company's manufacturing facility in Brazil.

The E-175 is the only aircraft that will have new winglets, but Embraer says it will make other changes to that aircraft and to three other models - the E-170, E-190 and E-195 - that will also improve efficiency across the type.

All four aircraft will have a smaller gap between the horizontal stabilizer and the aircraft tail. The manufacturer will also make efficiency improvements to the tail cone, the cabin door "rain deflector", the nose wheel fairing and the ram door, says Affonso.

Embraer will begin manufacturing aircraft with the changes in the first half of 2014.

With the changes, the E-175's fuel efficiency should improve 5% and make the aircraft 4% more fuel efficient than the competing Bombardier's CRJ900, he says.

Efficiency of the E-170, E-190 and E-195 should improve by 1% to 2%, Affonso adds.

New wingtips will only be added to the E-175 because efficiency gains will be most pronounced on that model, and due to the manufacturing timeline of the company's next variant of the aircraft, the E2 regional jet.

The first of those aircraft to enter service will be the 190-E2 in 2018, followed by the 195-E2 in 2019 and, finally, the 175-E2 in 2020, Embraer says.

Embraer 175 production will continue indefinitely on it assembly lines if U.S. scope clause doesn't move to fit the MRJ and E175-E2. "If Bombardier thinks we're going to discontinue the E1 and have no offering for an existing scope clause then they don't know us enough," said Mr. Curado.