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By Scott Hamilton

Arjan Hageman. Credit: GE Aerospace.

Oct. 16, 2026, © Leeham News: GE Aerospace has begun dust ingestion testing of its RISE Open Fan engine, the earliest it’s ever done so. The company told the media in advance of the Paris Air Show that this was coming—and now it’s here.

This is much more significant than the layman would understand. Colloquially, there’s dust and then there’s dust.

Dust in especially harsh environments, such as the Middle East and India, has played havoc on jet engines for decades. Dust from these areas has its own properties. In addition, dust in India is found in humid environments. Dust in the Middle East is in a dry climate.

Arjan Hegeman, vice president for the future of flight at GE, said in an interview with LNA last week that lessons learned from durability issues from its engines (as well as Pratt & Whitney’s GTF) contributed to the current, early effort to advance dust ingestion testing for the RISE.

The RISE Open Fan is GE’s primary bet for an engine for the future for the next generation of single-aisle airplanes—replacements for the Airbus A320neo and Boeing 737 MAX families. GE exclusively powers the MAX and has a majority share on the A320.

“We just kicked off our dust engine on Compact Core Technologies. We just recently shared that in an investor review earlier this week as well,” Hegeman said.

“It's the earliest we've ever done this type of testing. We're priding ourselves on how we do many more durability-type tests, like dust ingestion, which basically means you run 3,000 endurance cycles, which emulates each cycle as a flight of the engine.”

Endurance and reliability of engines from GE, PW, and Rolls-Royce have been troublesome since each company introduced engines powering today’s latest generation of airplanes.