GE Aerospace Plans to More Than Double Fighter Engine Output by 2032
GE Aerospace is in the middle of the biggest ramp-up of military fighter engine production the company has attempted in more than a decade, aiming to more than double annual deliveries of its F110 and F404/F414 engine families between now and 2032 to keep pace with a resurgence in demand for fourth- and fifth-generation fighters and a new generation of advanced jet trainers.
Company executives laid out the scale of the buildup in briefings covered by Aviation Week and FlightGlobal in the second week of September, describing a production system overhaul running in parallel with a Pentagon-driven surge in orders. The disclosures came days after GE Aerospace won a Navy sustainment contract worth up to $2.9 billion for F/A-18 engine parts and as the company pushes ahead with development of an entirely new adaptive-cycle engine intended for the US Air Force's next stealth fighter.
The numbers behind the ramp-up
GE Aerospace's defense engines unit says total engine deliveries rose 30% from 2024 to 2025, with executives targeting a further 15% increase by the end of the second quarter of 2026. F110 production specifically is set to climb 50% year over year in that same window. Looking further out, the company says it wants to more than double combined F110 and F404/F414 deliveries by 2032, compared to current output.
To put the target in context: F110 production ran at roughly 120 engines a year through much of the 2009-2016 period, with a historical peak of about 136 engines annually. The US Air Force, by contrast, has projected peak F110 demand of more than 180 engines a year by fiscal 2034 — a rate the service has not approached in the modern era. "We were producing 120 a year... it's very easy to get back there," GE Aerospace chief executive Amy Gowder said of the near-term target, according to Aviation Week, a framing that positions the harder stretch goal — pushing meaningfully past the historical peak — as the real test of the ramp-up.
Paul Ferraro, GE Aerospace's vice president and general manager for defense engines, described the shift as already visible on the shop floor rather than aspirational: "The production ramp that you see here — that's real," he told Aviation Week.
What's driving demand
The surge traces to several overlapping military programs. Boeing's F-15EX Eagle II, which uses a pair of GE's F110 engines, has seen a wave of new orders that is pulling F110 production upward. Lockheed Martin's F-16 also continues to draw on the same engine family for both new-build export aircraft and sustainment of existing fleets.
On the smaller F404/F414 side, growth is coming from an unusually crowded field of advanced jet trainer programs: Boeing's T-7A Red Hawk for the US Air Force, Korea Aerospace Industries' T-50, and Turkish Aerospace Industries' Hürjet all rely on F404-family engines, while India's Tejas Light Combat Aircraft has added further international demand. GE Aerospace says it is applying lessons learned from ramping up F110 production — in areas like supply base management, assembly sequencing and integration testing — directly to the F404/F414 lines to replicate the gains.
Those gains are already measurable inside the factory. GE Aerospace's internal "Flight Deck" production system has cut material-defect resolution time by 40%, shortened F110 high-pressure compressor shaft lead times by 56%, and cut F404 high-pressure turbine rotor lead times by 75%, according to figures the company shared with Aviation Week. The company also disclosed roughly $600 million in recent production-system investment, including about $100 million aimed specifically at its Lynn, Massachusetts facility.
A fresh $2.9 billion Navy deal
The production story was punctuated on September 2 by a new performance-based logistics contract worth up to $2.9 billion for parts supporting the F414 engine, which powers the Navy's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler electronic-attack aircraft. The deal runs through August 2031 with no option periods, according to details reported by Breaking Defense. "These mission critical aircraft play a vital role in the Navy's fleet, and we remain committed to sustaining their engines to maintain fleet readiness," GE Aerospace said in a statement announcing the award.
The same reporting noted GE Aerospace's separate role as prime contractor on a Pentagon Defense Innovation Unit program called HyCAT — Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities — under which the company is providing integration work and dual-mode ramjet propulsion for a liquid-fueled hypersonic test vehicle, with a roughly 24-month next phase that includes flight testing. GE described its role there as being "a propulsion solution provider" rather than a weapons developer, distancing the hypersonics work from the fighter-engine production story even as both fall under the same defense engines organization.
The sixth-generation engine in the background
While the F110 and F404/F414 ramp is about scaling proven, decades-old engine families, GE Aerospace is simultaneously advancing an entirely new design intended for the Air Force's future stealth fighter. The XA102 adaptive-cycle engine — competing against Pratt & Whitney's XA103 under the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion program tied to the Air Force's F-47 sixth-generation fighter effort — recently completed its Detailed Design Review, a milestone GE Aerospace has described as a significant step toward assembly of prototype hardware. Unlike a conventional turbofan with a fixed bypass ratio, the XA102 uses a variable third-stream architecture that can redirect airflow between fuel-efficient cruise and maximum-thrust combat settings, and GE Aerospace has said it is the first engine in the company's history developed using model-based systems engineering from the outset.
The XA102 program and the F110/F404 production ramp are formally separate efforts, but company executives have framed them as complementary evidence of a broader resurgence in US fighter engine investment — one rebuilding legacy production capacity for today's fleets while simultaneously developing next-generation propulsion for the fighter that is meant to eventually replace them.
Financial backdrop
The production ramp-up is unfolding against a separate, much larger corporate move: GE Aerospace's September 8 announcement that it would acquire castings supplier Consolidated Precision Products for $11.75 billion, a deal expected to close in the second half of 2027. That acquisition is aimed at securing GE's supply of complex cast and forged components — a persistent bottleneck across the jet engine industry in recent years — and executives have linked it directly to their ability to hit the fighter-engine delivery targets described above, though the financial and production stories are being tracked separately by industry press given the difference in scale and timeline between a multibillion-dollar acquisition and week-to-week factory output figures.
Why the industry is watching this closely
Fighter engine manufacturing occupies a smaller, more specialized corner of the aerospace supply chain than the commercial engine business dominated by CFM, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce, but it draws on many of the same constrained inputs — forged titanium and nickel-alloy components, precision-machined turbine blades, and a skilled machinist workforce that commercial and defense engine lines effectively compete for. That overlap is part of why GE Aerospace's defense engines leadership has been explicit about applying lessons from one program to another: the supply-base and assembly-sequencing fixes credited with cutting F110 lead times are now being pushed onto the F404/F414 lines specifically because the underlying bottlenecks — long-lead forgings, casting defect rates, and testing throughput — recur across both engine families.
The timing also matters geopolitically. Demand for F-15EX and F-16 airframes has been buoyed by a wave of allied purchases and replacement orders as air forces in the Middle East, Asia and Europe modernize fourth-generation fleets even as fifth- and sixth-generation programs remain years from full-rate production. Advanced trainer programs like the T-7A, T-50 and Hürjet reflect a parallel trend: air forces investing in dedicated jet trainers, rather than repurposed fighters, to prepare pilots for increasingly complex cockpits. Both trends point toward sustained F110 and F404/F414 demand well beyond any short-term order surge, which is part of why GE Aerospace is framing its 2032 target as a multi-year capacity build rather than a response to a single contract.
What to watch
The gap between GE Aerospace's near-term goal — getting F110 output back to its historical range of around 120 to 136 engines a year — and the Air Force's long-range projection of more than 180 engines annually by fiscal 2034 will be the clearest measure of whether this ramp-up succeeds. Supply chain capacity for forgings and castings, workforce hiring at facilities like Lynn, and the pace of new orders for F-15EX, F-16, T-7A and allied trainer programs will all determine whether GE Aerospace's 2032 doubling target is realistic or aspirational. Parallel progress on the XA102 program, meanwhile, will determine how much of GE's defense engine business a decade from now still depends on production lines that trace their lineage back to aircraft engines first delivered in the 1970s and 1980s.