Word: ge
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Basically, what GE did was to painstakingly refine its military designs into a line of passenger-jet engines. Its CF6, currently a popular engine for jumbo jets, was derived from a design initially developed in the late 1960s for the Air Force's giant C-5A cargo plane. The engine was the first to use a high- bypass technique in which a fan, working like a turbocharger in an automobile, pushes large quantities of air past the combustion core to produce much greater thrust. The CF6 turbofan (current cost: $6 million each) has broken the hold Pratt & Whitney had with...
...GE has also produced more than 2,000 of its smaller CFM56, the industry's current top seller. The compact engine is well suited to the new generation of shorter-range planes, like Boeing's 737-300, which airlines are using on their growing number of hub-and-spoke routes. The core of the CFM56, originally a top-secret design intended for the B-1 bomber, was the most advanced available...
Even more daring was the decision by GE to team up with a foreign rival, France's SNECMA, to design and produce the engine. Their partnership, the first of its kind, arose in 1971 from the friendship between two old soldiers: SNECMA's chairman Rene Ravaud, a crusty, one-armed hero of the French Resistance, and GE's chief enginemaker Gerhard Neumann, who had served as ground-crew chief for the Flying Tigers in China. Each company brought a key ingredient to the partnership: GE shared its high-tech engine core, while the French firm contributed financing from its government...
Four years ago, Pratt & Whitney helped form a five-nation consortium to produce a competitor to the CFM56, but that effort has been plagued by setbacks. The partnership initially claimed that the new engine, called the V2500, would be 14% more fuel efficient than its GE counterpart, but that estimate has been scaled back to 9%. Moreover, the V2500 lost a major customer in February, when West Germany's Lufthansa, citing technical flaws, canceled an order for 40 engines and turned to the CFM56. Now Pratt & Whitney is staking its comeback on its new large engine, the PW4000, for which...
...GE is betting heavily on a radical-looking new engine called the UDF, for "unducted fan." With 16 curved fan blades that spin in the open air, the engine looks like a food processor but produces a fuel saving of 40%. McDonnell Douglas has flight-tested the UDF on the prototype for its next midrange plane. But perhaps GE's moment of poetic justice really came last May, when Northwest Airlines, the diehard Pratt buyer, decided to buy 120 of the CFM56 engines. That must have prompted a few smiles at the light-bulb company...