Pratt & Whitney engines under investigation

Federal safety board grounds Boeing jets

Connecticut-based Pratt & Whitney is at the center of a National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the weekend failure of its PW4000-112 engine mounted on a United Airlines passenger jet that rained debris on a Colorado town.

On Sunday, NTSB ordered the grounding of Boeing 777-200 jets with the Pratt & Witney engines. Japan’s aviation regulatory body followed suit after a PW4000 engine had a similar failure last December during a Japan Airlines flight.

The United Airlines 328 engine failure was reminiscent of a 2018 incident when a PW4000 fan blade broke free during a United Airlines flight to Honolulu, re

sulting in similarly “uncontained” engine damage and fire. As the case with the Colorado and Japan flights, pilots made emergency landings relying their remaining engine with no injuries.

Pratt & Whitney offered no comment beyond a general statement pledging to “continue to work to ensure the safe operation of the fleet” and that investigative updates “will be at the discretion of the NTSB” in its words.

The PW4000-112 is one of three PW4000-series engines of varying sizes and thrust that Pratt & Whitney has manufactured since 1984, under former parent company United Technologies — which was acquired last April by Waltham, Mass.based Raytheon Technologies.

It is the largest engine produced by Pratt & Whitney with a diameter of 112 inches. Boeing 777200 and 777-300 aircraft are the only models that use the engine, with smaller PW4000 engines used for other Boeing jets as well as Airbus planes and McDonnell Douglas MD-11 models.

With its headquarters plant in East Hartford and another major facility in Middletown, Pratt & Whitney is Connecticut’s second largest privatesector employer with about 11,000 employees split between the two facilities at last report. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes initiated massive job cuts last year at Pratt & Whitney as the COVID-19 pandemic ground air travel to historic lows, but with only hundreds of job cuts for its Connecticut workforce.

Pratt & Whitney is counting on the newer PW1000 engine for future orders. The engine features a geared turbofan design with design efficiencies it calculates as saving airlines $1 million annually for each aircraft. The company also makes jet engines for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Boeing had 10 orders last year for the 777 series of airplane, with its outlook dominated by the 737 with 130 on order despite hundreds more canceled orders. As of the end of January, Boeing lists only about 30 unfilled orders for airplanes powered with Pratt & Whitney engines, with GE Aviation and its CFM International joint venture with Safran the dominant engines used on Boeing models today.

Global fleets for the Boeing 737-MAX were grounded in early 2019, after investigators attributed a pair of crashes to faulty sensors that recorded lower air speeds than was actually the case; and software that pushed the aircraft into steep descents to recover air speed, over the efforts of pilots unaware of the glitch as they struggled to pull the nose of the aircraft back up.

General Electric reported a $10.8 billion decline in GE Aviation revenue last year to $22 billion, with airlines having canceled 1,500 of the Leap-1B engines used on the 737MAX but thousands more remaining on order.

Boeing replaced former CEO Dennis Muilenburg with Dave Calhoun, who earlier in his career led GE Aviation.

Jessica Hill / ASSOCIATED PRESS A Pratt & Whitney engine at its headquarters in East Hartford in 2010. Pratt & Whitney employs a total of about 11,000 at its plants in East Hartford and Middletown.