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EMBRAER 170 ROLLS OUT

By Sebastian Steinke

Sun, samba and stage mist. With a show of Latin American temperament and punctual as a Swiss clock, the first Embraer 170 (previously the ERJ 170) rolled out of the hangar before the assembled festive company in São José dos Campos, Brazil at the end of October: a relatively lightweight, new generation regional jet, with two digitally controlled GE-CF-34-8E turbofan engines under its wings, a glass cockpit, electronic flight control of rudder and elevator (the ailerons are still manually actuated), with modern aerodynamics, winglets and an auxiliary turbine in the tail.

In this configuration the Embraer 170 comes over almost as a "proper" airliner which, with its oval body contour, offers what for a regional jet is an unusually generous amount of baggage space underneath the passenger deck. The corollary of this is that the internal cabin width is only 2.74m, so that seating is only four-abreast. This makes it quite distinctive compared with the "fatter" Fairchild Dornier 728/928 models, which have five-abreast seating. On the one hand Embraer avoids the central seat in fully occupied aircraft that passengers dislike, but the downside is that stretched versions require proportionally greater extra length. The same 170/190 family of aircraft is to cover a range from the baseline 70 seats in the Embraer 170 through to a maximum of 110 seats in the Embraer 195. The Brazilian manufacturer has not only done away with the designation "Embraer Regional Jet ERJ", but it has also re-christened the smaller version of its latest programme.

The recently unveiled prototype of the 70-seater (length 29.9m) is known as the Embraer 170, its recently announced stretched version for 78 passengers (length 31.68m) is the Embraer 175, the significantly larger 96-seat variant (length 36.24m) the Embraer 190 and, finally, the still further extended version (length 38.65m) with a maximum capacity of 110 seats that previously went under the name of ERJ-190-200 is now the Embraer 195.

According to the company, the unexpectedly announced Embraer 175 is to appear before the Embraer 190. The reason for this was "an explicit customer request", further details of which, however, have not yet been announced. Rumour has it that Crossair is considering converting a portion of the 170 planes it has on order to the somewhat longer, but shorter-range 175. There are also hopes of orders totalling 100 aircraft from British Airways and Qantas.

Winning additional orders in the face of the present slump in aviation will no doubt be the biggest challenge for management at Embraer, where development work on the 170/190 family has up to now been running according to schedule. However, that is a problem that has to be faced by manufacturers all over the world.

Viewed from close up, the prototype seems at first sight relatively "long-legged". This is because the General Electric engines under the aerofoils where they are easy to access require a certain clearance above the ground to avoid ingesting any foreign bodies. Viewed from the runway, the cabin floor of the passenger deck, is clearly above head height and should mean the Embraer jet has no trouble docking with passenger bridges. The underside of the fuselage inclines sharply upwards towards the rear just behind the wings, while the cabin width is kept at window height all the way to the back.

Wing-fuselage transition points, flap drive covers and surfaces produce a very smooth effect, giving the impression of careful design, perhaps not quite as "perfectionist" as on the latest Airbus models but definitely at the top end of the regional airliners and far above what has been standard on Embraer models up to now. With its modern structural design, the Embraer 170 should have no trouble negotiating the particularly steep approaches to London City and Lugano airports. The lines on the main landing gear legs are quite striking: they have been moved to the back of the landing gear struts to facilitate monitoring and provide easy access.

No access was possible at the roll-out to the cockpit and cabin of the first prototype "PP-XJE" out of what will eventually be a total of six prototypes and two airframes for structural tests. However, test workstations have already been installed in it ready for the flight trials scheduled to commence in December, along with ballast tanks and shelves for the still missing test instrumentation.

From the acting state president through the minister for defence, technology and transport to the governor of the province of São Paulo, the presence of so many important figures in the Brazilian political scene provided an indication of just how important the occasion of the roll-out is seen to be, and at the highest level, for the economic wellbeing of this not entirely free of cares developing nation.

"We are optimistic about the future since the Embraer workforce contains the top brains in the country", joked acting President Marco Maciel in keeping with the mood of the occasion, before adding on a somewhat more serious note, "As a 'public-private partnership', Embraer provides the basis for our scientific and technical progress. We want to participate in world trade, export, expand and generate value as well as jobs."

Since 1969, in an ambitious growth programme, aircraft manufacturer Embraer has progressed from state military supplier - every other plane in the Brazilian Air Force was built by Embraer - through to the now partially privatised company which today is the third largest jet manufacturer in the world. In so doing, Embraer has benefited from state grants, as Canadian rival Bombardier is forever bemoaning before the relevant trade organisations. In their defence, the Brazilians say that their past, rocked by political and financial crises, would prevent national manufacturers from being able to obtain investment credits under normal world market conditions. State funding simply alleviates this onerous legacy, which at the end of the day is not Embraer's responsibility.

Today Embraer aircraft are firmly established on the world market. Especially in the USA, the somewhat rustic, twin-engined Brasilia turboprops, and their more modern jet-powered cousins from the series ERJ-135, 140 and 145 are a familiar sight among the regional airlines. However, success on the north American market has also made Embraer heavily dependent on the fortunes of the airlines there, as unfortunately becomes only too noticeable when the airlines are in crisis, as at present.

Anyone who today strolls through the regional jet final assembly hangar at Embraer will see little else but aircraft in the colours of regional partners of the US airlines, American and Continental Airlines, apart from the odd military aircraft. Even so, a dozen aircraft are emerging from final assembly per month at present, although plans to ramp up production to over twenty aircraft have had to be shelved. 1,800 Embraer employees were recently made redundant. In 1995 it was still taking Embraer 15 months to build a Brasilia turboprop. Today a regional jet takes only four months to build.

Embraer needs additional markets. Hence the latest product is aimed much more strongly at Europe, with greater passenger comfort directed at the taste of the scheduled carriers that are classic there. And in fact Embraer succeeded right from the start in winning a distinguished launch customer from the Old World, the Swiss airline Crossair.

Embraer president and CEO Mauricio Botelho reported proudly on the occasion of the roll-out how he presented his project in September 1998 to the then head of Crossair, Moritz Suter. Crossair had been negotiating for some time along with Lufthansa CityLine about the design of the Fairchild Dornier 728/928, until they parted company over the issues of "four abreast versus five abreast" and the engine configuration, and Crossair signed a deal with Embraer at the end of 1999. The Swiss plan to have the main part of their fleet of regionals replaced by Brazil's showcase product by 2007.

Altogether, Embraer has clocked up 112 firm orders and 202 options for their latest model series, from Crossair, GECAS and Air Caraibe, for which an additional factory complex with six assembly docks has been set up in São José dos Campos. According to Botelho, the programme costs run to $859 million, and sales up to between 300 and 350 aircraft are expected over the next ten years.

A visit to a full-scale, fully fitted fuselage model of an Embraer 195 gave the opportunity to assess the current cabin design. Soft shapes without edges and a lot of indirect light are used to make Embraer's regional jets appear as spacious as possible and to underline the comfort aspect. The standing height of the aisle was sufficient for this 1.9m tall FLUG REVUE journalist. With a 32 inch seat pitch in standard seat layout or 31 inches in the maximum capacity variant, there are no significant differences compared with larger airliners, while the cloakroom, kitchen and toilet areas are equally generous. Naturally a certain "tubular effect" is discernible in the considerably extended Embraer 195, but on the other hand the passenger experience is quite different from the sometimes cramped earlier generations of regional aircraft with in some cases extremely limited onboard comfort.

Finally, at the end of the ceremony Embraer president Botelho revealed another surprise: in the new production hangar he drew back a curtain to reveal - to the amazement of the audience - the almost completely fitted second prototype that was temporarily painted like a Crossair 170, designated "HB-JCA". The third and fourth prototypes have likewise reached an advanced stage of completion as per schedule. It would thus appear that Embraer has secured for itself a good starting position in the race with Fairchild Dornier and Bombardier over the regional jets of tomorrow.

From page 22 of FLUG REVUE 1/2002