Airbus held, on Wednesday (09/03), the first flight of a A321neo equipped with Pratt & Whitney PurePower engines until then the most powerful propulsion option for A320neo Family aircraft.
The A321neo has already made its first flight as aircraft, but equipped with the CFM Leap-1A engines, Airbus will now proceed to make a version of the A321neo with Pratt & Whitney engines, which is scheduled for the last months of 2016. The PurePower engine family has completed more than 50,000 cycles and 32,000 hours of testing both on the ground and in flight.
The PurePower engine from Pratt & Whitney is already certified since 2014, currently flies commercially by Lufthansa, which was the airline thrower of the A320neo. But P & W faces a setback in its development program due to a small problem with the PurePower at its start, which is a more complicated and lengthy procedure when compared to the usual, thanks to that Qatar and IndiGo rejected deliveries until it was fully solved. Qatar Airways is studying an exchange of suppliers to circumvent the problem.
