FARNBOROUGH - GE's April delivery of the 13,000th engine of its T700/CT7 turboshaft/turboprop engine family marked yet another milestone in the 25-year history of T700/CT7 service.
The T700 engine and its civil counterpart, the CT7, have amassed more than 50 million flight-hours powering 21 different aircraft models in service throughout the world, and T700-powered aircraft accounted for nearly 70 percent of the U.S. Army's flight-hours in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
GE continues to enhance the performance, reliability and durability of in-service engines while developing new, more powerful models to meet current and future requirements.
This year, GE is introducing into production the T700-701D engine, rated at 2000 shaft horsepower (shp), to power Sikorsky's next-generation UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter. The T700-701D is currently powering flight-test UH-60M aircraft at Sikorsky's facility at West Palm Beach, Florida. The U.S. Army has also announced plans to convert to the T700-701D to power its entire Apache and Black Hawk helicopter fleets. Incorporating commercially proven hot-section components, the T700-701D offers more power and twice the component durability of its immediate predecessor, the T700-701C.
In April of this year, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted type certification to new models of GE's CT7-8 turboshaft engine, including the CT7-8A, -8B, -8E and -8F. The new models are the only FAA-certified engines in the 2600-shp class available for today's modern medium-lift helicopters, including the upgraded Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter planned for U.S. Army Special Operations Forces.
The CT7-8C, currently undergoing maturation testing, is the newest and most powerful engine in the T700/CT7 family. Selected to power Sikorsky's new H-92 Superhawk helicopter, the 3,000-shp-class CT7-8C produces 20 percent more power than the CT7-8, but it fits in the same installation bay. The CT7-8C incorporates upgraded materials in the turbine and a new, advanced three-stage power turbine, compared to the two-stage power turbine of earlier CT7-8 engines. The CT7-8C also features the advanced, fully redundant, dual-channel FADEC (full authority digital electronic control) system with which the entire CT7-8 engine family is equipped. FAA certification of the CT7-8C is targeted for 2007.
GE Transportation - Aircraft Engines, a part of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), is one of the world's leading manufacturers of jet engines for civil and military aircraft.