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Embraer Drops Plans for Ventral Speedbrake on EMB 170
Embraer has dropped plans to fit a ventral speedbrake to its Embraer 170 airliner in order to attain steep approach certification for London-City Airport (LCY). “It was noisy and added 100 kg to the aircraft,” said Luis Carlos Affonso, the ‘father’ of the E-Jet family. Instead, the Brazilian manufacturer says it will make the 70-seater aircraft compliant by using existing controls, deploying full flap, and using the airplane’s existing wing-mounted speedbrakes to produce adequate drag and keep speed and approach slope ‘in the green’.
There was an initial urgency to make the 170 compliant with LCY’s 5.5º approach for original launch customer Swiss, but following the carrier’s recent takeover by Lufthansa this is very much on the back-burner. According to Embraer, “there isn’t currently a customer requesting LCY certification for 170, so we have more time to develop the system.”
Embraer and Swiss’s original objective was to fly a full 70-passenger load out of LCY with a range of around 500 nmi. “We are beating this. Our test aircraft is outperforming these figures, and we hope to offer a range of 700 nmi with full passenger load by the time we gain LCY certification at the end of 2006,” Affonso told Show News. —Mike Vines
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