GE Aviation is powering into Farnborough International Airshow 2018 in the wake of winning a nearly half-billion-dollar contract follow-on from the U.S. Air Force to continue development work on its adaptive cycle engines for potential air superiority applications. The $437 million contract was awarded by the USAF Life Cycle Management Center.

“GE is excited to continue the maturation of adaptive cycle engines; it will enable revolutionary combat capability of future platforms,” said Dan McCormick, general manager of GE’s Advanced Combat Engine Program. “Three-stream adaptive cycle engines bring a generational change to what propulsion can provide as compared to legacy engines or potential upgrades to legacy engines.”

Over the past decade, GE and the USAF have matured the enabling technologies and architectures of adaptive cycle engines through a series of design and test activities in the Adaptive Versatile Engine Technology (ADVENT) program, Adaptive Engine Technology Development (AETD) program, and Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP). These efforts have “validated the revolutionary capability afforded by this class of technologies and adaptive architectures,” said McCormick. “Our adaptive cycle engine design and test learning over the past decade will be leveraged in this recent contract award.”