Pratt & Whitney

Pratt & Whitney has been building aircraft engines since 1925, longer than almost any other name in the industry, and it now operates as a subsidiary of RTX Corporation alongside Collins Aerospace and Raytheon. Its business splits cleanly into military and commercial engines, and both halves matter enormously to the businesses that depend on them. On the military side, Pratt & Whitney's biggest program by far is the F135, the sole engine for every variant of the F-35 Lightning II. It is the largest active military engine program in the US, and Pratt has been working on an Engine Core Upgrade under a contract worth up to $1.3 billion to give the F135 more thrust and cooling capacity as the F-35's onboard systems grow more power hungry. Before the F135 there was the F119, developed for the F-22 Raptor under the Advanced Tactical Fighter program in the 1990s, and Pratt continues to sustain that engine under long-term Air Force contracts even though F-22 production ended years ago.

Older but still active is the F100 family, which powers F-15 and F-16 fleets across dozens of air forces, along with the F117 that powers the C-17 Globemaster III and the TF33 still flying in the B-52 and E-3. Pratt's military engines fly with roughly 27 air forces worldwide and account for around 11,000 engines currently in service. On the commercial side, the company's defining product of the last decade has been the PW1000G geared turbofan, marketed as the GTF, which uses a gearbox between the fan and the low-pressure turbine to let each spin at its own optimal speed. It powers the Airbus A320neo family, the Airbus A220, and the Embraer E2, and it now flies on more than 2,200 aircraft for 85 operators. The GTF's early years were rougher than Pratt would have liked, with a manufacturing issue that forced inspections and groundings across hundreds of engines, a problem the company has spent several years working through.

Older commercial and regional programs include the PT6 turboprop family, one of the most widely used engine lines in aviation history, and Pratt & Whitney Canada continues to build and support it. Pratt & Whitney also does the unglamorous but essential work of engine sustainment: overhaul, repair, and parts supply for engines already in the field, which for a company with tens of thousands of engines flying worldwide is a steady and significant part of the business on its own. It employs roughly 43,000 people and is headquartered in East Hartford, Connecticut, the same town where the company built its first engines a century ago. Because it reports as part of RTX rather than separately, Pratt does not have its own stock ticker, but its engines sit at the center of some of the largest defense and commercial aviation programs flying today.