So where am I going with this? Can anybody else think of a company with the tooling, in-house talent and workforce capable of producing airframes and jet engines but absolutely no desire to break into and compete in those markets on their own? Companies with a heavily-unionized workforce sitting on their laurels while the public doesn’t buy their products? Companies we might have given a whole boatload of money to recently?

While having a single airframe and a single engine do make for a single point of failure should one or the other have a problem that requires grounding the fleet for a time, there is no reason that work stoppages or natural disaster need stop the production of same. Further, if the design specs are properly laid out with respect to the airframe there’s no reason the engines themselves cannot be of two different designs, so long as they both bolt up using the same connectors — think small-block Chevy, the internals are different but one bolts in place of another.

At sea you’re replacing engines more than you’re doing serious rebuilds in the airframe — the parts you need to carry are the consumables, for the rest you swap engines and either rebuild on the bench or send the remains back to the factory for a replacement, right? Having multiple manufacturers should make it more cost-effective to replace rather than rebuild, and I’d expect that engine to find itself used in other roles as the manufacturing costs decrease with scale.

Were I a betting man, I’d bet on GM and Chrysler having parts of this contract.

– Max

Are you saying that such complexity is too much today?

It may be preferable to rely on as few powerplant types as possible, but it’s hardly vital.

That means that the only thing that should be needed to swap a P&W for a GE engine should be to pull all the connectors, unbolt it, slide it out, slide in the other manufacturer’s engine, hook everything up again – and maybe load a different engine control firmware.

If they can’t do that… forget it and single source it. Although it seems that having a Rolls-Royce engine in the mix would help with foreign sales.

This goes with air propulsion too. Like it or not, it does. When you have an O-2 or O-3 cutting their teeth on GE engines and that’s all they’ve known and they’ve loved the performance and that motor has gotten them out of a few binds, that is what they know, that is what they love. Come 20+ years down the road, when now said O-2′s and -3′s are in positions of the decision making process as to what is going to power the latest and greatest… they ARE going to lean towards what they know, what they are comfortable with, what they like, unless of course the manufacturer seriously pissed someone off (think PW in the 70s.)

So what you’re seeing here also is a power play for PW to get back INTO the Navy. They haven’t had a brand new USN contract in forever and a day. They blew it in the 70s and it’s still hanging over them. This is their opportunity to have influence in a whole new generation of Navy fighter/attack pilots. GE also sees, if they get shut out of the F-35 as they have the F-22, it’s not just engine and spares sales, it’s potential loss to get one’s foot in the door 20 years from now when every pilot out there sleep eats and breathes their PW engine and has… for a long time.

And on a sidenote, notice I said Vietnam Vets referring to J52s. I’d not ask anyone of my generation what they think. It’s 40+ year old technology. But back in it’s day? When it was THE propulsion system like the F119 is to the F22? It couldn’t be beat.

Keeping that one (“from mastodons to virgin princesses”)