Avio Aereo, the Ge records engine was born in Piedmont

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The most powerful aircraft engine in history, General Electric’s Ge9x, intended to pilot the Boeing 777x, which has now completed the certification phase with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has an Italian and Piedmontese heart. Following Ge’s acquisition of the Avio Aero company – 4,600 employees in Italy – industrial competencies in the avionics engine sector have been relaunched so that Italian engineers have developed the Ge9X turbine module, in addition to designing the entire system. engine of the new Catalyst engine, completely Made in Italy project.

The role of General Electric

For the Italian industry this is a kind of new baptism. Until 2003, a company of the Fiat Group, then controlled until 2013 by two venture capital funds until the acquisition, in August 2013, by General Electric, today Avio Aero has achieved a central position in the European aircraft engine industry. . “Industrial skills in the civil sector have their roots in the history of this company – says Pierfederico Scarpa, Avio Aero’s vice president of marketing, sales and strategy – with a collaboration with Ge dating back to the 1990s. We started working as component manufacturers, while the most noble industrial part, linked to aerodynamics, was manufactured by large OEMs such as General Electric. Our aspiration was to grow in skills to become systems engineers. In the Ge9X, in particular, Italy is responsible for the gearboxes and the entire turbine module, coordinating partners such as Safran’s French. In the Catalyst project, Avio Aero is responsible for the development of the engine itself. “The Catalyst is the first Ge engine developed outside the United States, in Europe and with an Italian heart. This allows us to be at the table of the few Western nations capable of developing a complete engine, alongside England, France and the United States, ”adds Scarpa. The investments made in Italy by Ge, after the acquisition of Avio, Scarpa recalls, exceeded one billion, with a 30% growth in the Italian branch’s income and effects on employment.

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Italian innovation

Industrial skills go hand in hand with innovation, Avio Aero in fact has production lines dedicated to additive printing in Italy. “We started working in this sector – explains Scarpa – before GE acquired us and this represented a competitive advantage. The Group helped us in the next step, that of industrialization on a larger scale. Today a third of the Catalyst is produced with additive printing, in addition to the turbine blades of the Ge9X. A technology that looks to sustainability and therefore to the future, because it uses less raw material, produces less waste material and revolutionizes the engineering process, without forgetting the reduction of weight of the components in favor of a lower consumption of aircraft.

The global economic environment is as difficult for the civil aviation sector as it is for the automotive sector, for example. The drop in passenger traffic around the world is estimated to be 60% this year, with an overall reduction of nearly 3 billion travelers and more than $ 400 billion in revenue gap. The risk therefore lies in misalignment between aircraft production and deliveries, a delicate step that tests the robustness of the entire supply chain. For a company like Avio Aero, whose components are present in 80% of commercial flights in the world, the current year records a 30% contraction in revenue and the company has closed an early retirement agreement with the unions. than 60 employees in Italy. «In such a difficult market moment – Scarpa concludes – we are reluctant to use tactical levers to overcome difficulties without neglecting the strategic levers that project us to the post-Covid. Fortunately, we have already made most of the investments in the main programs, we continue to think about how to face the recovery without losing opportunities.