Final Flight Test of GE9X Features S. S. White Technologies Flexible Rotary Shafts on Honeywell Aerospace’s Engine Air Turbine Starter

St. Petersburg, FL --- S. S. White Technologies, the leading supplier of flexible rotary shafts for the aerospace industry, is supplying flexible rotary shafts specifically designed to transmit rotary torque for the manual override on the Honeywell Aerospace Starter Air Valve for the new GE9X turbofan engine which will have its final flight certification test next month. The world’s largest and most powerful turbofan engine is designed to power the Boeing 777X aircraft.

The Honeywell Aerospace Air Turbine Starter (ATS) consists of two components, the Starter and the Starter Air Valve. The Starter Air Valve controls air flow from the Engine Bleed, APU or Ground supply to the ATS and has significant built-in operational and protection features. One of the many features incorporates an S. S. White flexible rotary shaft that allows ground crews to manually actuate the Starter Air Valve in case of an operational failure thus enabling the aircraft to still be dispatched avoiding flight delays and cancellations.

In addition, all S. S. White aerospace flexible shaft products are designed to one of the industry’s highest performance criteria by utilizing a unique computer modeling software program developed by S.S. White called PERFLEXION. This program allows the design engineers to more fully model the behavioral characteristics of the wire bundles within the shaft core and arrive at an optimum product that provides maximum bending flexibility and torsion strength while allowing minimal torsion deflection with up to a 30 percent improvement over competitive products.

S.S. White Technologies is a world leader in the designing, engineering, manufacturing and testing of a wide variety of flexible shaft products for the aerospace, medical, industrial and automotive markets around the globe. Almost all of the commercial and military aircraft platforms in the air today (except Russian) rely on S. S. White Technologies flexible rotary shafts. And, more than one-half of US manufactured cars and second tier global automotive suppliers rely on S.S. White flexible rotary shafts. The company currently has design, engineering and manufacturing facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom and manufacturing facilities in India.