The Army on Wednesday awarded General Electric [GE] a contract for T700 aircraft engines worth more than $1.1 billion.
Work on the new production deal is expected to be completed by June 2029, according to the Pentagon.
The GE Aerospace T700 engine powers the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk and AH-64 Apache helicopters.
GE Aerospace is also currently working on the future T901 engine for the Army, developed under the Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP), which will eventually power Black Hawks and Apaches.
The T901 was also intended to power the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) platform before the Army announced in February its plan to cancel development of the program, which had been in a competitive prototype phase with Sikorsky [LMT] and Bell [TXT] (Defense Daily, Feb. 8).
Along with canceling FARA, the Army noted at the time it would also delay moving into production of the T901 engine and invest in further research and development efforts.
Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation, told reporters in late April the service had recently ran GE’s T901 engine on Sikorsky’s FARA prototype, gathering data ahead of a planned first flight with the new engine on a UH-60 Black Hawk in early 2025 (Defense Daily, April 25).