Pratt Wins Order For Pakistani Fighter Jets
The unrest over the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has not derailed a sale of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani Air Force, nor has it affected the related sale of Pratt & Whitney-built engines for those planes.
Pratt & Whitney officials have confirmed that Pratt will sell the engines for the new Pakistani fighter jets to be built by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics of Fort Worth, Texas.
Although Pratt officials did not disclose the value of the engine order, based on the aerospace industry’s rule of thumb that puts the worth of engine orders in an aircraft contract at about 25 percent of the overall cost of the planes, the deal should be worth roughly $125 million to Pratt.
Pratt has been gathering a head of steam on the military side of its business, and just last month marled the maiden test flight of the first Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. Pratt makes the F135 engine that powered the jet fighter during its 35-minute-long inaugural flight.
The flight was the latest in a series of milestones for the F135 engine, which in October achieved initial flight release approval. The engine has recently surpassed 6,700 hours of ground testing in addition to the more than 3,600 hours accumulated during the concept demonstration phase of the F-35 program, according to Pratt statistics.
Six years of development and ground testing has been undertaken at Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tennessee.
The F135 engine is an evolution of the F119 engine used in the F-22 Raptor military jet.
In addition to Pratt and Rolls-Royce, the F135 engine team includes Hamilton Sundstrand, which makes the engine’s control and fuel systems, external accessories, and gearbox. Windsor Locks-based Hamilton, which like Pratt is a subsidiary of Hartford-based United Technologies Corp., also supplies the aircraft’s electric system and fire detection and suppression equipment.
The U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, and the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force and Royal Navy plan to buy a total of 2,581 F-35s once they enter production phase, according to Pentagon background. Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark, and Norway also are partners in the program and are expected to buy a combined 700 aircraft.
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