After three-thirty years

At the time, the market segment for medium widebodies was largely dominated by 1970s airframes. Airbus’ offer comprised the twinjet A300 and its A310 shrink, while the rest of the market consisted of trijets: the Douglas DC-10 (with the McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 launched one year earlier than the A330) and the Lockheed L-1011. Boeing’s stretch of its 1981 767 airframe, the -300 version, took wing in 1986, with the longer range -300ER variant arriving with Japan Airlines in 1988.

Fast forward to today and the general demise of the four-engined airliner. The A330 is currently offered in two current engine option (“ceo”) versions, the A330-200 and -300, and two new engine option (“neo”) versions, the A330-800neo and -900neo — which largely match the passenger capacity of the -200 and -300, respectively, with max-pax numbers of 406 and 440 each.

It competes with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, and fits in the Airbus family between the A321 (and A321neo), which maxes out at around 240 passengers in a tight single-class configuration, and the A350-900, for which Airbus specifies a typical seating of 325 and a maximum of 400.

(By contrast, Cathay Pacific’s three class business-premium economy-economy layout, meanwhile, carries 280 on board.)
Qantas operates both ceo variants on domestic and regional routes, with the previous exception of the Sydney-Auckland-Los Angeles-New York JFK run. Virgin Australia uses the A330-200 on domestic and its new regional international services. Both airlines offer business and economy — but no premium economy — on board. Qantas’ A330-300 features 28 business class and 269 economy seats, Virgin’s -200 holds 20 up front and 255 down the back, and Qantas’ -200 fleet is still in refurbishment, with either 36 old Skybeds or 27/28 new Business Suites, plus between 199 and 243 economy seats.

But as the production of the A330ceo begins to dovetail downwards with the upwards production of the A330neo, what’s next for this international workhorse? Australian Aviation spoke with A330 head of marketing Crawford Hamilton live from Lisbon, where TAP Portugal’s first A330neo made its first stop on a world tour for route proving and to show off the new aircraft.

The A330 has evolved significantly over its lifetime, yet first deliveries are still flying

But first, we need to rewind the clock. Back in 1992, Hamilton explains, “We had a 212 ton airliner, the A330-300, just the one model, no 200. Then, it was clear it was a bit of a slow burner. Where it did well was in Asia, and it was flying inter-regional Asia. And it was a good aircraft but, to be honest, it wasn’t quite getting the volume we needed, and we also realized that we needed a smaller airplane as well.”

The A330 was in service with regional powerhouse airlines like Cathay Pacific Thai Airways International, Malaysia Airlines, Korean Air, together with European carriers like the then-Sabena and Aer Lingus. Many of the early aircraft are still flying around Asia-Pacific and indeed the world.

“With the launch of the A330-200 [and] EIS in 1990,” Hamilton explains, “we got ourselves an aircraft with quite a lot of range — up there with the 767, and it was to take on the 767. Meanwhile, we also upgraded the A330-300 to a 230 tonnes standard, and then very quickly after that, within about a year, they’d both gone up to 233 tonnes.”

A higher maximum takeoff weight in tonnes means an aircraft with more range and more options for airlines. At that point, Hamilton says, “what we were getting then was an aircraft that was starting to then get into other markets. We saw the aircraft getting more acceptance in Europe, and it was getting more acceptance in Asia.”

Subsequently, Airbus enhanced the structure, improved its robustness, upgraded systems, updated the flight deck, added a fly-by-wire rudder, implemented a new onboard maintenance system — all of which secured new markets.

“We were a little bit in America, but it gave us a big launch with Northwest,” Hamilton explains, noting that “it got us into Qantas. It got us into a whole load of new customers. So what we started to see was, now we had a worldwide aircraft.”

In a case of unfortunate timing, Airbus launched the freighter A330-200F version straight into what Hamilton calls “the biggest recession ever. A lot of that 70 ton freighter market dried up, at that time, due to the decline in the industry.”

However, Hamilton notes, “interest is perking up in that 70 ton freighter at the moment,” although the momentum is with Boeing’s pair of the 767F and 777F at present.

On the military side, the A330 MRTT — launched by Australia as the KC-30A and based on the A330-200 — has been ordered by six further air forces: France, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

These aircraft intersect in interesting ways with the civilian fleet, with two of Australia’s MRTTs converted from Qantas-operated leased aircraft, while the UK’s MRTTs are provided by the Airtanker private sector partnership, which wet- and damp-leases part of the fleet as civilian aircraft when not required for military use.

The A350 Mark I stumbling block turned into the A330neo

In late 2004, largely in response to the order success of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Airbus agreed to launch an aircraft to succeed the A330 that was then called the A350, but which was in essence an A330 with new wings, engines, horizontal stabilisers, systems and aerodynamic improvements. This aircraft did not go down well with buyers, and at the 2006 Farnborough Airshow Airbus unveiled the all-new A350 XWB.

“I think one of the things was that the 350 Mark I was very much a hurried response to the 787. I think, to be honest, the level of success it got, showed that,” Airbus’ Crawford Hamilton readily admits.

Enter in 2014 the A330neo, which, like its smaller A320neo cousin, stands for “new engine option”. Crucially, the new generation of composite airliners suffer from the “a lot of aircraft” problem, where weight is optimised for long-range and ultra-long-range flights, including the use of expensive composites.

“The difference here is that we’ve taken our time. It’s been a proper process to define and optimise this airplane compared to where we were with the A350. The A350 Mark I definition never really quietened down, whereas what we’ve done here is that we’ve been very methodical, we’ve gone through everything, and we have a program, with the aircraft that is flying to day, is the aircraft that passed our first maturity gate in 2014.”

From the new engines — exclusively the Rolls-Royce Trent 7000, compared with multiple engines on the earlier versions — Airbus secures what is advertised at nearly 15% fuel burn benefit. There is, Hamilton admits, “a cost to that, and the cost is the weight of the engine. We needed to get a pylon that would be able to support that weight of the engine, then modify the structure behind the wing, on the wing, to be able to take that weight. In addition, because the engine’s so much bigger, engine integration’s one of the big issues. It’s actually integrating that engine onto the airframe to make an airplane, rather than just an airframe and an engine.”

In particular, Hamilton notes, “the engine had to be moved upwards because it’s so much bigger. The top of the engine is actually higher than it is in the current aircraft so we can maintain the ground clearance that we have at the moment.”

‘The engine had to be moved upwards because it’s so much bigger.’ Crawford Hamilton

“If you look at the two engines together,” Hamilton notes, “I’ve seen them at Rolls Royce, the Trent 700 compared to Trent 7000 looks like a JT8D! So there was a lot of work to be done there: we also had to do a new nacelle, a new air inlet, all these kind of things.”

Knock-on effects come from any such changes, of course. “We then had to take account of that, aerodynamically, on the inner wing. We’ve got new wing to fuselage fairings, all to just sort out all that airflow. You’re putting so much more of a big lump of an engine there that it squeezes the air in ways that are different from the Trent 700, for instance.”

“We also also have extended the wing by about 4 meters in terms of span, to round it up to 64 meters. What that does is that gives us extra efficiency. Within that we’ve also got the sharklet. But in some ways the sharklet is really now just part of the wing, because we’ve used the A350 computerised fluid dynamics — and all the high tech stuff that we used on the A350 — to model the wing, the sharklet, and everything, in 3D. It’s one big 3D surface.”

At that point, the rest of the aircraft comes under scrutiny for weight saving, as the margins between different groups of designers and engineers are re-examined with modern modelling and design technology to determine where optimisations are possible.
But the A330neo’s big delivery problem has turned out to be, as so often with modern commercial airliners, suppliers: in this case the production and quality of the Rolls-Royce Trent 7000.

Rolls-Royce’s production problems have necessitated — and driven — A330neo programme changes

The issues encountered by Rolls-Royce in production of the latest versions of its Trent family of widebody engines have been numerous, ongoing and seemingly continuous. Whether the very similar Trent 1000-TEN powering the Boeing 787 Dreamliner or the Trent 7000 for the A330neo, delays and knock-on delays as Rolls works through its problems have been extensive.

“The big thing, here,” Crawford Hamilton says rather charitably, “is that Rolls had rather a lot on their plate. They had the Trent 1000-TEN, they had the Trent 7000, and they had the Trent XWB97 for the A350-1000.”

Rolls-Royce also had further issues with previous generation Dreamliner engines, of course.

“We spoke to Rolls and we had to help them prioritise. Really, it’s about making sure that we could get, as you said, get the right number of engines at the right time, and be able to deliver on promises.” The crux of the matter, Hamilton says, “was helping us to understand exactly where Rolls were: but what it means is that we now have a really good engine. Happily, it’s been flight tested by our wonderful new colleagues in Seattle, on the 787-10 [as the Trent 1000-TEN]. Our flight test engineers, during flight tests, really knock the hell out of engines, and they said these engines are still performing really well.”

Part of that closer working with Rolls-Royce has also driven different ways to work within Airbus, with “excellent cross-cooperation, everyone really focused on the project across the company. So you can bring in all the people from support, you can bring in the people from engineering, the people from program, the people from my area [marketing], commercial, people from commercial, from everywhere: they’ve all been really focused.”

“For instance,” Hamilton continues, “my people in commercial, we meet every two weeks with the people from program, and we give them feedback on what’s happening in the market, we give them feedback on what customers are saying about it, we get where customers have an issue, and together we work through to look at solutions and proposals and suchlike. That didn’t happen as much before, and it does happen now. We can use our closeness to the market to bring the whole of our engineering organisation, and production organisation, and program organisation, closer to the customers to ensure that we can have an even better focus on their needs.”

Even as the A330-900neo proves its capabilities, questions remain about the programme

When the first delivery A330-900neo aircraft returns from its route proving tour in TAP colours, Airbus will swap the engines out for brand new models before delivering the aircraft to TAP, and slip the route proving engines onto the first A330-800neo, which has now been constructed but for which no orders presently exist.

The smaller -800neo will be certified in 2019 — but will anyone want to buy it? Boeing recently snatched a major A330-900neo order from American Airlines (inherited from US Airways), as well as the Hawaiian Airlines A330-200 replacement programme, out from under the neo’s nose, with what one must assume must have been some keen pricing and services deals.

Yet Hamilton is still bullish on the smaller neo, which will be part of delivering Airbus’ Global Market Forecast — predicting 5,480 medium aircraft (up to 300 seats) and 1,760 large aircraft (up to 350 seats) worth a combined total of two trillion US dollars, between now and 2037.

“We have round about six hundred A330-200s out there, and lot of them are going to be replaced. But, they’re not getting replaced at the moment. They’re a relatively young fleet: they are about eight years average age,” Hamilton explains. “So what we’ve done with the aircraft is: it will be ready to start replacing the oldest ones of these ones when they are ready, and that’s starting to happen now, 2020-23 — that’s when they will start to need to be replaced. And that’s a huge market.”

“The A330-200 has 95 operators: it’s the most widely operated single-type widebody, if you get my meaning. So we have whole lot of opportunity there, in that market. In addition to that, we’ve also got the remaining 400 or so 767s. Now, American — yep, we lost there, it was a very big battle. Boeing were very, very competitive. American have made their choice, but there are still other operators out there who have large numbers of 767s to replace, so that’s another market for us. That’s going to be harder for us than just replacing A330s, but that’s a challenge that we are up to taking, and continuing what the A330-200 did, which was replace 767s all over the world.”

With a substantial number of A330-200s servicing Australian-Asian markets, Hamilton notes, “I think it’s fair to say that Asia Pacific is the region of the A330. I think as far as I can remember, it’s something like getting on for probably about 50% of the fleet, at least, in Asia Pacific. What we know is it is the biggest aircraft, it’s the biggest widebody in China, for instance. It’s been, for many years, [with] Korean, and Thai, and Malaysia. We’ve got our people who are our ‘familiar customers’ as it were, where we see opportunity there.”

‘Asia Pacific is the region of the A330.’ Crawford Hamilton

Within Australia, he continues, “for Qantas, I think it’s fair to say that the aircraft is the backbone of the Qantas fleet. The 787s in Qantas are not replacing A330s, they’re replacing 747s, so the A330 is the backbone of that fleet. You’ve also got there Virgin as well, it’s one of their wide bodies, it’s the biggest fleet that they have of wide bodies. So, for us, there’s a big replacement market out there, in Asia.”

With the A330-900neo, Hamilton notes, a Sydney-Los Angeles route is possible, while the -800neo will reach further “halfway across” the United States. “If you start to get into using advanced operational software, and advanced dispatch and suchlike, you’ll probably fly quite a bit further. And that’s how Qantas, for instance, do Perth to London,” Hamilton says.

“But I think the other thing, also, is the fact that the business models in Asia are changing: we’re starting to see a lot of low cost carriers. And when you see people like Cebu, Air Asia X, people like Lion Air, there’s got to be opportunity in these existing low cost carriers and, indeed, whatever other carriers come into the market in the future,” Hamilton says. “So there is a massive market in Asia as people get richer and their propensity for air travel gets bigger, and they want to travel round the region. But, of course, now, we offer an aircraft with the capability for Asia into Europe, Asia to North America; we can really help Asia travel the world with the A330neo.”

The big question for the A330 at this point remains whether the neo will truly take off. With over two hundred orders — all for the -900neo) from more than a dozen airlines, crucial confirmation decisions are to come from AirAsia X (66) and Delta Air Lines (25).

As the usual order kerfuffle in the runup to the Farnborough Air Show began, AirAsia’s Tony Fernandes seemed as yet entirely satisfied by the performance, engine, and price of his dozens of A330-900neos, though he highlighted that if the A330neo is the jet “we dreamt of and fought for”. Fernandes is no stranger to playing A versus B in the pricing stakes, but with Iran Air’s 28 neos stalled for US diplomatic reasons, that would place nearly half of the aircraft’s orders in doubt.

Rolls-Royce issues notwithstanding, the A330neo’s biggest weakness at present may well be the success of the A330ceo, which many airlines are finding remains competitive. The biggest opportunity, meanwhile, may be the backlog for, and pricing of, current composite fleets. If Airbus can deliver a new or upgrading operator an A330neo fleet at speed and at low cost, and if fuel economics returns to focus, it may well have an ace up its sleeve.