Inside Pratt & Whitney's $125 Million Polish Bet: Why One Country Now Builds Parts for the GTF, the F-35 and the F-16 All at Once

One Plant, Three Very Different Engines

What makes the Niepołomice site notable is the breadth of what rolls off its lines. The plant currently produces components for the PW1000G GTF (Geared Turbofan), the engine that powers the Airbus A320neo family and Embraer's E2 jets; the PW800, used in large business jets from Gulfstream and Dassault; and the F135, the engine that powers every variant of the F-35 Lightning II fighter, according to RTX's announcement.

That mix — a commercial narrowbody workhorse, a business-jet engine, and the propulsion system for the West's most widely deployed fifth-generation fighter — running through a single Polish plant illustrates how concentrated some of the industry's supply chains have become, and how much weight a handful of sites now carry.

"Poland plays a vital role as a key hub in Pratt & Whitney's global engine production, a commitment further strengthened by our $125 million investment in facilities this year," Dariusz Stopa, general manager of Pratt & Whitney's Niepołomice site, said in the company's announcement.

Why the Timing Matters

The investment lands at a moment when Pratt & Whitney is trying to climb out from under a supply-chain and quality crisis that has dogged the GTF program for several years, including a metal-powder contamination issue that forced widespread engine inspections and grounded jets across multiple airline fleets. RTX has spent heavily to expand GTF production and MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) capacity globally in response, and the company said in 2026 that GTF orders and commitments have topped 800 for the year, with customers including British Airways, Finnair, AirAsia and VietJet among others.

Expanding the parts base that feeds the GTF — rather than just final assembly — addresses a structural bottleneck: airlines have complained for years that slow parts delivery, not final engine assembly, is what has kept spare engines and shop visits backed up. Tubular assemblies and forged disks are exactly the kind of long-lead, precision-machined components that have been chronic pinch points across the aerospace supply chain since the pandemic.

On the military side, F135 production has also faced its own scrutiny — the engine has been the subject of congressional and Pentagon attention over spare parts shortages affecting F-35 fleet readiness. Additional forging and machining capacity for F135 components in Poland adds a second geography, outside the continental United States, capable of producing parts for the fighter program.

Poland's Growing Aerospace Footprint

The investment also reflects a broader pattern: RTX has built up a substantial industrial presence in Poland across its three main business units — Pratt & Whitney, Collins Aerospace and Raytheon — that now totals more than 9,500 employees in the country, according to the company, making Poland RTX's largest employee base and site of investment outside the United States.

That scale did not happen overnight. Pratt & Whitney has operated in Poland for more than two decades, initially drawn by lower labor costs and a skilled engineering workforce, and has steadily added capabilities — from component repair to full manufacturing — as the country's aerospace and defense sector matured. Poland's government has actively courted this kind of investment through its Investment Support Program, which offers tax incentives tied to job creation and capital spending in designated economic zones, of which Niepołomice's Special Economic Zone is one.

The Rzeszów expansion announced in April is more specialized. RTX said that site will house new capability for processing isothermally forged parts — components made using a high-temperature, high-pressure forging process that produces the fine, uniform metal grain structure needed for rotating parts that spin at tens of thousands of RPM inside an engine core — along with associated heat treatment, sonic inspection and machining operations. Rzeszów already produces parts for the GTF, F135 and F100 (the engine that powers F-15 and F-16 fighters), meaning the two Polish sites together now touch nearly every major engine family Pratt & Whitney builds.

What Comes Next

Neither Polish project is expected to be fully operational before 2028, meaning the near-term effect on Pratt & Whitney's parts backlog will be limited — this is a multi-year capacity build, not a quick fix for today's shop-visit queues. But the timing signals where RTX believes its bottlenecks will persist: not in final engine assembly, but in the long-lead forged and machined components that feed it.

For Niepołomice specifically, the more than 120 new jobs would meaningfully expand a workforce at a site whose current headcount RTX has not publicly disclosed in detail. The company has not said whether further Polish investments are planned beyond the current two projects, though the pace — two nine-figure-adjacent announcements in five months — suggests Poland will remain a focal point of Pratt & Whitney's capacity expansion through the rest of the decade.

Sources

• RTX's Pratt & Whitney invests $25 million to expand precision parts manufacturing in Niepołomice, Poland
• RTX's Pratt & Whitney invests $100 million to increase production capacity, add advanced capabilities in Poland
• P&W invests millions in Polish GTF and F-35 engine facility — Aerotime
• Pratt & Whitney Invests $25 Million in Poland for F-35 Engine — Aviation A2Z
• RTX's Pratt & Whitney GTF engines surpass 800 orders and commitments in 2026, year to date