Pratt & Whitney passes one of the most important milestones in its long history as the much-heralded Geared Turbofan engine takes to the skies this month. Installed and nearly ready to fly aboard the company’s Boeing 747 testbed in the days leading to the start of this week’s Farnborough airshow, the GTF demonstrator underwent 250 hours of ground testing since engineers first ran the engine in November 2007. According to Pratt & Whitney, all indications point to a smooth transition from 20 years of study into a real-world model of efficiency from which the world’s airlines will reap benefits for decades.
“The engine is running real well,” said Pratt & Whitney next-generation product family vice president Bob Saia. “The GTF modules that we have on this engine are meeting or exceeding the commitment levels we have made to [launch customer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries] and Bombardier. Certainly there’s a lot of fine tuning that we’ll do during what we call our design and development phase, but the overall characteristics look really good.”
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