Leeham News and Analysis
There's more to real news than a news release.
Leeham News and Analysis
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- Boeing defends 787, 777 against whistleblower charges April 17, 2024
PW to dual-source neo engine manufacture
Pratt & Whitney will dual source manufacture of the A320neo GTF engine so there is no single point of failure, an official said at the PW Media Day in Hartford.
Tom Mayes, general manager of the company’s Middletown (CT) facility, also said that a decision hasn’t been made for a production location of the GTF version for the Mitsubishi MRJ. PW is assembling the Bombardier CSeries version at Montreal Mirabel Airport.
PW CEO David Hess said the GTF, offered on the A320neo, the CSeries, MRJ and the Irkut MC-21, will drive PW’s revenues from $12.7bn last year to twice that by 2020. Over the life of the program, Hess estimates the GTF will produce $325bn in revenues.
There currently is a backlog of more than 2,600 GTFs.
Ground and flight testing is validating promises about GTF performance, Hess told the international media: 16% better fuel consumption vs today’s engines, lower noise and on-target maintenance forecasts.
Well, great news for P&W. It has been a long time since they were really able to compete with GE, RR, and CFMI.
Is the 16% improvement a new figure?
My poor old memory seems to recall 15%.
Maybe part of the 4% rumoured to be in reserve?
Seems likem a risk reducing strategy. High start up costs, but also higher capasity. Interesting when looking back on the single point of failure supply chain dramas we saw in recent yrs..
It is a guttsy move by P&W. I would think they needed about 8,000 firm engine orders before considering a second source to build engines. The NEO program has given them a good start, but they are not even half way to 5,000 engines, even including the CS-100/-300 orders. They need sustainable sales, which they don’t have, yet (for that matter, neither does the LEAP-1 series engines). They have a good order book, but I look at that orderbook as a ‘flash-in-the-pan’ as the backlog is only for about 5-6 years, once full scale production begins. The P&W J-57/JT-3C/JT-3D/TF-33 series of engines had that sustainability, production ran from about 1952 to 1990. The CFM-56 series family of engines also has that sustainability with production from about 1980 through today and into the later parts of this decade.
To date CFMI has sold something like 23,000 to 24,000 CFM-56 engines. The P&W J-57/JT-3C engine family sold about 21,500 engines, but that has to be coupled to the JT-3D/TF-33 engines which added another 8,000 to 9,000 engines.