East Hartford jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney has received an order worth hundreds of millions for 300 of its next-generation geared turbofan engines from Indian budget airline IndiGo, The Associated Press reports.
Pratt President David Hess told reporters gathered in Florida for the company’s media day Thursday that IndiGo’s order reflected strong demand for its new PurePower engine, which has been in development for more than 20 years.
Based on earlier per-engine cost estimates, the IndiGo order will almost certainly generate revenue for Pratt totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, before spare parts and other engine options are added.
Adding up previous PurePower orders, Pratt has several billion dollars of sales in hand.
“The backlog keeps getting bigger,” Hess said. “And we better start cranking up the test program and get these engines through development and into production and out to our customers.”
Parent company United Technologies Corp. in Hartford has spent $1 billion to develop the geared turbofan engine. It says the engine significantly improves fuel efficiency while reducing carbon emissions and noise.
IndiGo president Aditya Ghosh said in a news release that the engine would “allow us to make dramatic improvements in environmental performance with reduced emissions and significant savings in fuel consumption.”
