Pratt & Whitney Turn Back the Clock

A decade ago the Australian airline system was ruled by the famous bald eagle. The domestics operated JT8-powered 727s and DC-9s while even Ansett’s DC-9s were replaced with similarly powered 737s during the early eighties. Qantas flew an all Pratt-powered 747 fleet and were just beginning to consider the possibilities of a changeover to Rolls Royce. Today, the domestics fly 737s powered by the GE/Snecma CFM56 while their wide bodies are all GE CF6 powered and their 727s approach the sunset of their careers. Qantas now only specifies Pratt power aboard their 767 twinjets and this itself may change in the future as Rolls is also now aboard this marque. The RAN uses a marinised version of the CF6, the LM2500, aboard its FFG patrol frigates while the new Seahawk and Black Hawk helicopter fleets are all GE T700 powered. Up a notch in performance is the RAAF F-18 Hornet with its twin GE F404s.

Internationally, GE did the smart thing back in the late sixties and hung its logo up alongside Airbus and McDonnell Douglas. This gained them nearly total supremacy on the A300, A310 and DC-10 in addition to generally winning the engine orders for 747s purchased by airlines operating the smaller twins and trijets. Nowadays GE is well ahead of Pratts, as is Rolls Royce, on powering the new 747-400 and the MD-11 trijet. Pratts only salvation has been some continuing sales aboard the 747, a handful of 767 orders and its ongoing sales of JT8-209s aboard the popular MD-80 series twinjet. Even militarily there have been customer defections with later versions of the F-16 being available with . GE F110 power in place’ of the traditional Pratt & Whitney F100. A similar fate has also been suffered on the Grumman F-14D programme while later versions of the F-15 may also be GE powered.

Why has this happened?

That is generally a complex question, though in this case it is fairly simple to answer. In every age there are certain aircraft types that prove immensely right for their times. In the fifties the diminutive Vickers Viscount was one of them, followed by Fokker’s Friendship. These aircraft did great things for the Rolls Royce Dart turboprop. A decade later saw the 727 sweep all before her despite some bad times through the mandatory highs and lows of aerospace. The Boeing trijet was followed by the smaller 737 and Douglas DC-9, all JT8-powered and immensely successful worldwide. Pratt power had meanwhile also been behind the largest US military engine programmes – the eight-engined 8-52 programme alone required more than 6000 engines as did the B-47 before it, while the KC-135/707 family eventually consumed over 7000 engines at a time when amortisation costs and R&D investment were almost always government-financed via the military.

Today that has all changed. The teaming of GE and France’s Snecma to launch CFM International during the seventies with a primary objective of building the definitive JT8 replacement has been immensely successful. GE also scored a coup by getting their Triple E (EEE) big fan engine operational earlier than Pratt’s PW4000 series. The Triple E programme was jointly sponsored by NASA and aimed at developing vastly more efficient, powerful and cheaper-to-maintain versions of existing JT9 and CF6 powerplants. GE launched into this programme with great vigour and subsequently scored some worthwhile A300 and 747 orders while Pratts were still chasing FAA certification. Even aboard the 757, Pratts have generally lost heavily to Rolls Royce despite the fact that the type’s single largest order, 60 for Delta, are PW2037 powered. If you had told a P&W senior executive twenty years ago that his company’s engines would be outsold by the British engine manufacturer then he would no doubt have laughed heartily at your audacity.

And perhaps that is the problem. Being the biggest for so long is not necessarily a good state of affairs for nurturing a sound and commercially profitable future. Today Pratts is in financial difficulty yet they ably sponsor vastly expensive art shows around Australia while doing very little in the way of promoting offset work within Australian industry. As an example of this, this magazine has recently received two beautifully produced books featuring the works of noted American artists and their paintings of the wild west. It is ironic that a company sends us expensive books on Wild West paintings yet has never, in ten years of publication, ever personally contacted this magazine regarding their engine programmes. By comparison, we have regular and in-depth briefings from virtually every other engine and airframe manufacturer in the world. Is it any wonder that Pratts’s star is dimming?

The point we make is that in business you cannot ignore your market requirements. You cannot sit on the sidelines and allow a competitor to steal your territory. Today, the world’s once greatest aero engine manufacturer goes into the final decade of this century essentially with only the PW2037 and PW4000 series civil engines, the smaller PW120 series on commuter aircraft and the F100 series within the military as their primary engine programmes.

No doubt Pratt & Whitney would like to turn back the clock along with the design of their corporate logo