Are Propfans The Great White Hope?

During the next decade, props will begin to replace jet engines, as we know them today, on many airliners and aircraft of other types.

A Boeing artist concept of what the projected 150-seat 1992 aircraft might look like. Boeing quote seat-kilometre per litre savings of up to 60% as against late nineteen eighties airliner designs and up to 100% as against the 727-200 and 737-200. Boeing are pinning the entire success of their ‘1992 airliner’ on the practical application of propfan technology and will test fly a GE unit aboard a 727 during mid-1986. Boeing will also test fly the Pratt & Whitney equivalent during 1987 while McDonnell Douglas will also undertake similar test flights during that year using an MD-BO.

But just how soon, and in what form, and over what power/size range, is the subject of considerable dispute among airframe and engine manufacturers.

And just what exactly is a propfan anyway? The genre has already sprouted its own lexicology of confusing acronyms with a speed and diversity remarkable even by the aviation industry’s usual predilection for such mumbo-jumbo.

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