General Electric [GE] is pitching its XA100 adaptive cycle engine for wide application across DoD and said on Nov. 14 that it finished third phase testing of the second XA100 at its Evendale, Ohio plant outside of Cincinnati over the summer.
“We have successfully completed third phase testing on our second XA100 engine,” David Tweedie, GE Aerospace’s general manager of advanced products, told Politico‘s defense summit in Washington, D.C. GE wants its XA100 to serve as the “foundation for technology and architecture in multiple propulsion systems we plan to bring to bear in the future,” he said.
U.S. Air Force officials have not disclosed details on the service’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) manned fighter’s design, including what propulsion system the development aircraft is carrying.
GE has said that the XA100 will give future, tactical fighters 30 percent increased range, 20 percent more acceleration, and 200 percent more thermal management–improvements that Tweedie said are “based on hard, empirical test data we’ve gathered in a test cell and shown to the Air Force.”
“As the Air Force and other services look to bring these technologies to bear, we plan to be the engine company of choice when those competitions happen,” he said.
The Air Force plans to use technologies developed in the
Advanced Engine Transition Program (AETP) for the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program, which will move into engine prototyping with GE and RTX‘s [RTX] Pratt & Whitney offerings (Defense Daily, Aug. 2).
The Air Force’s fiscal 2024 budget proposed canceling AETP for the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 fighter and moving forward with Pratt & Whitney’s proposed Engine Core Upgrade (ECU) for the company’s F135 engine (Defense Daily, March 13)..
Jill Albertelli, president of military engines at Pratt & Whitney, said at the Politico defense summit on Nov. 14 that 600 RTX personnel, including 500 engineers, are working on ECU and that a program preliminary design review is imminent.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that the decision to go with ECU for the F-35 was a budgetary one, as AETP would have entailed several billion dollars more in development than the Air Force had already spent. General Electric developed an XA100 AETP engine for future blocks of the F-35, while Pratt & Whitney had received funding for an XA101 adaptive cycle engine.
NGAP engine prototyping with GE and Pratt & Whitney is a change from the previous strategy, which envisioned just one engine provider in the prototyping phase. That change came because of increased NGAP funding, the Air Force has said.
Unlike the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2024 defense bill, which reinstates AETP with $150 million, the Senate Appropriations Committee’s bill does not contain AETP funding.
House and Senate appropriators provide the Air Force-requested $595 million for NGAP. Senate appropriators would direct Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall to include NGAP in future budget requests under an NGAP budget line, rather than under Advanced Engine Development, as in the past.
In addition to the $595 million for NGAP, Senate appropriators would fund Advanced Engine Development for “future engine technologies” at $280 million.
“With continued positive testing results as well as congressional support for advanced engine development, GE Aerospace is moving this cutting-edge technology closer to the hands of America’s warfighters, with learnings that could support the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program,” GE Aerospace said of XA100 on Nov. 14.
“Supported by over 400 engineers, the second XA100 engine underwent its third round of testing at GE Aerospace’s Evendale, Ohio facility to validate minor design improvements informed by previous testing conducted in 2022; further solidify the engine’s detailed design and digital models; and accelerate adaptive propulsion development and associated technologies for sixth-generation applications through scenario-specific testing,” GE Aerospace said.