GE Aerospace

From the turbosupercharger to the world’s most powerful commercial jet engine, GE Aerospace’s history of powering the world’s aircraft features more than 100 years of innovation. GE accepted the challenge first, but another team also requested the chance to develop the turbosupercharger. Contracts were awarded in what was the first military aircraft engine competition in the U.S. Under wartime secrecy, both companies tested and developed various designs until the Army called for a test demonstration. In the bitter atmosphere of Pikes Peak, 14,000 feet above sea level, GE demonstrated a 350-horsepower, turbosupercharged Liberty aircraft engine and entered the business of making airplanes fly higher, faster and with more efficiency than ever before. That mountaintop test of the first turbosupercharger landed GE's first aviation-related government contract and paved the way for GE to become a world leader in jet engines. For more than two decades, GE produced turbosuperchargers that enabled aircraft, including many in service during World War II, to fly higher, with heavier payloads. The company's expertise in turbines and turbosuperchargers figured into the U.S. Army Air Force's decision to select GE to develop the nation's first jet engine. Since then, the aircraft engines division of GE Aerospace has scored many firsts. Among them: America's first jet engine, the first turbojet engines to power flights at two and three times the speed of sound, and the world's first high bypass turbofan engine to enter service. Today, GE Aerospace is a global provider of engines, systems, and services, with revenues exceeding $30 billion. As a leader in aviation technology, GE Aerospace continues to design, develop and manufacture jet engines, components and integrated systems for military, commercial and business and general aircraft as well as aero-derivative gas turbines for marine applications. In addition, GE Aerospace is the world's leading integrated engine maintenance resource. In 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps picked GE's Lynn, Massachusetts, plant to build a jet engine based on the design of Britain's Sir Frank Whittle. Six months later, on April 18, 1942, GE engineers successfully ran the I-A engine. In October 1942, at Muroc Dry Lake, California, two I-A engines powered the historic first flight of a Bell XP-59A Airacomet aircraft, launching the United States into the Jet Age. The thrust rating of the I-A was 1,250 pounds; the thrust rating of the GE90-115B is more than 90 times as great at 115,000 pounds. The I-A engine incorporated a centrifugal-flow compressor, as did the increasingly more powerful engines developed by GE during the next two years, culminating in the J33 engine, which was rated at 4,000 pounds of thrust. The J33 powered the U.S. Army Air Corps' first operational jet fighter, the P-80 Shooting Star, to a world's speed record of 620 miles per hour in 1947. Before the end of that year, a GE J35 engine powered a Douglas D-558-1 Skystreak to a record breaking 650 miles per hour. The J35 was the first GE turbojet engine to incorporate an axial-flow compressor--the type of compressor used in all GE engines since then. However, the Air Corps, concerned about disrupting supplies of turbosuperchargers, placed production of GE's jet engines with other manufacturers. GE then set about designing another. The resulting J47 put GE back in the business of building jet engines. But demand for the J47 to power almost all the new front-line military aircraft, particularly the F-86 Sabre Jet, meant the Lynn plant could not keep up. GE needed a second factory. GE selected a federally owned plant near Cincinnati, Ohio, where Wright Aeronautical piston engines had been produced during World War II. GE formally opened the plant on February 28, 1949, with the second J47 production line, to complement the original line at Lynn. Later, the plant would be known as Evendale and would become GE Aerospace's world headquarters. With