Aircraft and Engines

In July 2023, with its second-quarter results, RTX disclosed that a rare condition in the powder metal used to make certain high-pressure turbine discs in Pratt & Whitney's geared turbofan (GTF) engine could cause the discs to crack. The engine powered a large share of Airbus's best-selling A320neo family, as well as the A220 and Embraer's E2 jets. Powder metallurgy produces discs with a finer, more uniform structure than conventional casting and forging, which suits parts that spin at high speed and temperature; its weakness is that a stray contaminant particle in the powder becomes an inclusion in the finished part, invisible to the eye and hard to find with inspection methods not designed for it. The contamination had reportedly entered during a ramp-up of powder production around 2015, as the engine was heading into service.

On 11 September 2023 RTX put numbers on it in an 8-K. About 600–700 engines would have to come off wing for inspection between 2023 and 2026, beyond Pratt's earlier plans, and RTX would book a pre-tax charge of about $3 billion in the third quarter. Pratt's own projections, as reported by Aviation Week, assumed shop visits of about 300 days, an average of about 350 aircraft on the ground through 2026 and a peak of about 650. The total cost to Pratt and its programme partners, MTU Aero Engines and Japanese Aero Engines Corporation, was put at about $6–7 billion (reported). Regulators did not ground the type; the groundings followed from the removals. Airlines that had built their growth on the A320neo, among them IndiGo, Wizz Air and Spirit Airlines, cut schedules, leased in older aircraft and negotiated compensation. Pratt paid about $1 billion of compensation in cash in 2025 and guided to about $700 million for 2026 (company, reported).

The fastest way to return aircraft to service was not compensation but shop throughput, and Pratt's choice of where to send scarce parts shaped two companies' production. Pratt raised its output of overhauled PW1100 engines by about 26% in 2025 and about 35% year on year in the third quarter of 2026 (company, reported), and the count of aircraft on the ground fell by more than 20% from its 2025 high by the end of 2025 and by about 25% in the first seven months of 2026 (reported). But parts sent to the fleet were parts not sent to Toulouse and Hamburg. On 19 February 2026 Airbus's chief executive, Guillaume Faury, called Pratt's planned 2026 engine volumes "insufficient"; Airbus pushed its A320-family rate target of 75 a month from early 2027 to the end of 2027, blaming Pratt for not committing to the engine volumes it had ordered, and from March 2026 pursued damages from Pratt (reported). A metallurgical escape at a powder plant around 2015 had become, eight years later, the binding constraint on the production rate of the world's largest aircraft programme.