Productive past and promising future - AEDC and Pratt & Whitney celebrate 50-year partnership

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  Pratt and Whitney's (P&W) partnership with the 'modern' Air Force apparently had its beginnings in a long-standing working relationship between General of the Air Force Henry "Hap" Arnold and Frederick Renschler, the man who founded the company in 1925. 

In "Dependable Engines: The Story of Pratt & Whitney," author Mark Sullivan tells how Renschler leveraged that bond in the spring of 1940 to persuade General Arnold to shift from one engine project to another. He convinced the general to abandon research on liquid-cooled fighter engines to a project on a P&W radial engine that seemed more promising as America was being drawn into what would become World War II. 

Eight years after President Harry S. Truman officially dedicated Arnold Engineering Development Center to General Arnold, P&W established a field site at the center. 

When Steve Finger, P&W president, visited Arnold Oct. 31 to congratulate the local field site's team for earning the P&W Achieving Competitive Excellence (ACE) Gold site status, he also helped celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company's partnership with AEDC. 

"I'm here to celebrate the entire Pratt & Whitney, ATA and Air Force team," he said, addressing those attending the gathering that took place at AEDC. "Fifty years - this has been quite a journey. With the important work being done here on the F119 and the F135, it's nice to have a Gold site on that journey." 

Center Commander Col. Art Huber said the 50-year partnership between P&W and Arnold is a role model for how to provide consistently top caliber engineering and best practices between the government and industry. 

"We - AEDC and Pratt & Whitney - have made a concerted effort over the years to forge the kind of partnership that enables us to accomplish our mission and meet the country's requirements for both national defense and commercial competitiveness." 

In 1958, staffed by a small group of P&W engineers, mechanics and technicians who rotated between Arnold and the company's Florida and Connecticut centers, testing began on the J75/P/9 engine, the power plant for the Convair F-106 Fighter. 

According to David Hiebert, AEDC historian, the P&W site also conducted testing on the TF33 engine that powers the B-52H Stratofortess bomber at Arnold from 1960 to 1961. However, the longest and more significant project undertaken by P&W at AEDC began around late 1969, early 1970 timeframe when the F100 engine showed up. The F100 is the power plant for the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon, two mainstays of air forces in 21 countries. 

When Sam Hall, the manager of P&W's small core of test engineers at AEDC, first came to the center in 1993, the P&W site had no permanent staff. 

"I was the first one who was permanently assigned here," he said. "Now we have five test engineers on site and we've also got analysis, control and instrumentation engineers, mechanics, one structures engineer and an engineer for optics, non-intrusive stress measurements and light probes." 

A year before Hall's arrival, P&W brought the first commercial engine to AEDC for testing. This was the 4084 jet engine powering the Boeing 777 airliner. More recently, P&W worked with AEDC to conduct testing on the GE-Pratt & Whitney Engine Alliance GP7200 powering the massive Airbus Industries A380 airliner. The total commercial test work amounted to about five percent of the total engine testing done at AEDC; however, it was significant in terms of experience for the P&W and center contractors, and additional revenue for the Air Force. 

Hall, who has worked as a test engineer on military engines throughout his career, helped with developmental and operability testing on the F119 engine, the power plant for the F-22A Raptor, before and after arriving at Arnold. 

He also made sure the team working on commercial engines had the broadest range of expertise available. 

"When we last did commercial testing at Arnold it was the GP7200," Hall said. "We had a lead engineer from Connecticut, and I supplied a couple of people from my staff here to take part in that effort. When we have someone who is very familiar with the AEDC test process on a project like that, it makes for a really good team - we're able to do high quality cross-training. With every engine that comes here, I want at least one of my people there to provide the expertise from an AEDC point of view about altitude testing on that engine." 

Finger said he was particularly proud of the F100's safety record and expected the same to hold true for ongoing work on the F135, one of two engines slated to power the F-35 Lightning II. 

"We are very proud of the fact today that the F100 has the safest single engine record of any engine," Finger said. "We believe the F135 is going to build on that, and I attribute the safety record to really two things - one is the way we focus on maturing the engine during the development process. Altitude evaluation, is a critical part of that. The other is the way that we mature the engine in actual operation and again, on the F100 we were able to do that in the F-15 and the twin engine F-15 before we did it in the F-16." 

Finger, who helped conduct F100 testing at AEDC in the 1980s, said AEDC is an amazing facility and a national asset. 

"There is value in altitude engine testing in particular," he continued. "The capability at AEDC to really cover all aspects of the way the engine operates and to wring out all of these off-design conditions - ones you can't even test in an airplane - is just a tremendous value." 

Looking toward the future, he said the P&W, Air Force and ATA team are focusing on the same cohesive and thorough testing process with the F119 and F135 engines, which share a common core as well as other common parts. 

"I see what we're doing now with the F135 as we prepare it for the Joint Strike Fighter and the F119 for the twin-engine F-22A Raptor," he said. "We are wringing out these engines throughout the flight envelope and under all kinds of adverse conditions - in endurance and operability conditions. This really gives us a chance to find and test these limits, to test the edge of the envelope and find and then improve anything necessary before we go operational." 

Finger said he is looking forward to the upcoming work P&W will undertake at Arnold, especially with the F135, an engine which comes in three variants - a Short Take-Off/Vertical Landing, Conventional Takeoff and Landing, and Carrier version. 

"After 38 years, we're still testing F100s and we're obviously still testing F119s at Arnold," he said. "As the F135 goes operational and enters service, there will be derivatives and improvements and things like that along the way." 

He also cited one significant reason why P&W has worked so well with AEDC over the years. 

"We have many people working for Pratt and Whitney who are former Air Force personnel or came from the military, and I think it really helps to make up a better company," he said. "It ensures that we always have a link to and understand the customer."