[atyppo]

There’s a huge industry of leasing jet engines to avoid downtime since most shop time is spent waiting for engine repair. The lessors hot swap engines and avoid downtime for an entire jet just so an engine can get serviced. This is a perfectly normal practice in the aviation industry.

[KennyBlanken]

Leasing "thrust", not engines; there's a distinction that might not be obvious at first.

Engines are leased at different thrust ratings depending on what the airline needs. Mostly fly out of long runway airports in fairly cool, low altitude (ie dense air) locales lots of thin, svelte passengers who have little luggage, on fairly short trips with not much fuel needed onboard? You can get away with a lot less thrust than an airline that caters to overweight tourists flying out of Las Vegas with luggage loaded to the gills with trinkets.

The lease usually includes everything needed to make the plane go VROOM when the pilot pushes the loud lever, including live monitoring of telemetry for performance and repair issues; a plane might get scheduled for repair, with parts routed and mechanic time scheduled, mid-air...

It's a perfectly normal practice...that ground to a halt in Russia with economic sanctions, and was why a bunch of people in the airline industry sat up and took notice when the sanctions started rolling in. In theory leases could be up a few days after sanctions started and the plane would be dead on the tarmac (or maybe they get a minimum amount of thrust, enough to fly the plane mostly unladen. Not sure. I don't know the industry well enough.)

There were stories that Russian airlines were looking to, or expected to, hire hackers to hack into the engine FADEC units to re-enable them when the leases were up / change their thrust levels, etc. What could possibly go wrong with hiring people to hack your plane's FADEC units...

This is on top of all the airframe leasing, of course. Lot of people expected planes that were leased by Russian airlines to suddenly fly only domestic routes, or routes to countries with friendly governments bribed by Russian oil, grain, and loans who wouldn't allow a repo team to do their thing.

[progman32]

You're telling me that there are devices built into civilian airplanes that are able to disable or hobble the engines based on the whims of _business agreements_? It seems beyond reason that a pilot would be denied an engine's full design thrust, especially in a contingency that requires as much performance as possible (terrain avoidance, wind shear, aerodynamic surface failures, engine flameouts, on-ground emergencies after takeoff decision speed, go-arounds, etc...) Can you expand a bit on how this system works? Do you know what prevents a mistyped lease expiry date from causing dangerous incidents?

I hope it's fully airgapped at the very least...!