EAST HARTFORD — The Pentagon has awarded a $1.5 billion contract to Pratt & Whitney’s military engines division for 99 additional engines to power F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
The majority of the work will be done in Connecticut, a Defense Department contract listing says.
The contract, when added to previous awards connected to the latest round of orders, brings the total to $1.95 billion.
The lion’s share of the work, 89 percent, will be done in Connecticut, at Pratt’s Middletown and East Hartford plants, the Defense Department says. The rest of the work, related to a short takeoff and vertical landing propulsion system from Britain’s Rolls-Royce, will be done in Indiana and England.
Work is to be completed by Sept. 2019.
The F135 engines will power 44 planes for the U.S. Air Force, four for the Navy, and nine for the Marine Corps, accounting for $911 million of the contract. Forty more engines will go to power F-35s for international allies and two engines will be held as spare engines.
The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland, is the contracting activity.
International partners in the F-35 program include Australia, Italy, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, and United Kingdom.
Three additional foreign military customers are Israel, Japan, and South Korea.
Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, F-35 program executive officer, commended Pratt today for continuing to reduce the cost of its F135 engines.
Compared to the previous contracts, per-unit prices were reduced by 2.6 percent, Bogdan said Friday.
“The propulsion system team has kept its word in delivering on its price-reduction commitments,” he said, which he called “critical to making the F-35 more affordable for the U.S. military and our allies.”
Bogdan added: “Now that we are ramping up production with increased volume from Pratt & Whitney and from their global supply chain, the program is really gaining momentum.”
Mark Buongiorno, vice president for Pratt’s F135 program, also said his company and its suppliers are focused on delivering the engines “at or below the cost targets.”
Since 2009, Buongiorno said, Pratt has reduced the cost of the conventional F135 engines by half and the short take-off and vertical landing versions by nearly 35 percent.
To date, Pratt has delivered 288 F135 engines, he said, with the first deliveries of engines from the latest contract to start in 2017.
Pratt is a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., based in Farmington.
