Word: pratt
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...persevered, and is now the world's dominant engine builder by a commanding margin. Last year GE captured an estimated 63% of the market, compared with 27% for Pratt & Whitney and 10% for Rolls-Royce. The company's success is a classic lesson in the value of patience and persistence, as the design of a new jet engine is a devilishly long-term process that can consume at least five years and more than $1 billion. GE took a more astute aim at the aircraft market of the future, while Pratt & Whitney failed to develop a full range of quieter...
...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 its JT9D on the giant Boeing 747. GE has boosted production of its most powerful version, the CF6-80C2, from 110 engines in 1987 to 260 this year to meet a backlog of nearly 500 orders...
...CFM56 has no real rival, because Pratt & Whitney scuttled its plans to build a similar model. The engine builder, a division of Connecticut's United Technologies, cut development plans in the 1970s under the parent company's acquisitive chairman, Harry Gray. "Instead of building this engine, Gray * bought Otis Elevator. It was a monstrous mistake," says Wolfgang Demisch, who follows the industry for the Union Bank of Switzerland. The company later suffered "a market-share erosion as severe as any I can bring to mind," said Demisch...
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...
...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...