EAST HARTFORD, Conn. - Pratt & Whitney and Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. (KHI) met recently to commemorate the signing of a risk and revenue-sharing collaboration agreement for KHI to provide key hardware modules for Pratt & Whitney's PurePower Geared Turbofan (GTF) engines.

Pratt & Whitney currently has 10 worldwide GTF collaboration partners, many of which work across multiple GTF engine variants to be installed on various aircraft platforms for Pratt & Whitney customers. These aircraft programs are directed by Mitsubishi Aircraft Corp, Bombardier Aerospace, Airbus, Irkut and Embraer.

"Our collaboration on the GTF started in 2007 when our great partner, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, selected the PW1200G Geared Turbofan engine for their Mitsubishi Regional Jet and soon after joined the program as a partner. Since then we have continued to seek risk-sharing relationships with GTF program participants," said Bernard I. Zimmerman, vice president, Group Strategy & Development for Pratt & Whitney. Zimmerman's team is responsible for establishing and managing these risk and revenue-sharing collaborations with various Pratt & Whitney "partners".

Pursuant to the collaboration agreements, partners will provide hardware modules and assembly and test services with an expected value in excess of $49 billion over the life of the programs. An example of a successful partnership is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Aero Engines, which performs engine assembly and test on the PW1200G engine for the MRJ as well as MTU Aero Engines AG (MTU), which performs assemble and test on some of the PW1100G-JM engines for the Airbus A320neo.

"Even before we secured our first customer in 2007, we started working on risk and revenue-sharing agreements with our design responsible partners MTU and GKN Aerospace Engine Systems (formerly Volvo Aero Corporation), both of whom invested their own resources with Pratt & Whitney on compressor and turbine exhaust case development and on the Geared Turbofan Demonstrator Engine," said Zimmerman. "It is very rewarding to see these efforts payoff in helping secure customers and other partners."

In addition to the four aforementioned collaboration partners, Pratt & Whitney has agreements with Japanese Aero Engines Corporation, Industria Turbo Propulsores of Spain, Mitsubishi Corporation, Singapore Airlines Engineering Company, IHI Corporation and GE Avio.

Now that Pratt & Whitney has completed new collaboration partner agreements, any further activity will be limited to bringing existing hardware sources into existing or new collaboration agreements.

Source: Pratt & Whitney
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