How readiness stays ready: The F110 delivers power, reliability and scale for the F-15EX

Throughout its 40-year evolution and more than 11 million flight hours, GE Aerospace’s F110 engine has reliably delivered speed, superior thrust capability, and proven operational efficiency — key demands of critical fighter platforms like the F-15EX and the F-16. But over the past three years, the company has intensified and extended its commitment to this stalwart military engine program to ensure the F110-GE-129 continues to give U.S. Air Force pilots the power and reliability they need to complete the mission and come home safely. That commitment goes beyond reliability and performance alone — it’s about delivering at the speed and scale today’s warfighter demands.

GE Aerospace’s investments in the F110 are paying off in both production and delivery performance. The company has boosted its output to meet the evolving needs of allied operators, with the ultimate aim of giving every possible edge to the modern warfighter. These investments position GE Aerospace to meet the growing demand recently outlined by the U.S. Air Force.

Strengthening the Supply Chain

This doesn’t mean simply working harder. It means building capability in a focused, deliberate way. GE Aerospace’s advanced manufacturing — including additive manufacturing on the F110 engine line — demonstrates how innovation can streamline production and reduce part counts to deliver faster, at greater scale, and at a sustainable cost. In 2021, the company achieved a major milestone when the U.S. Air Force qualified an additively manufactured F110 sump cover, the first engine component of its kind designed and produced using metal 3D printing to receive airworthiness approval from any U.S. Department of Defense entity.

While the company has significantly modernized production of the F110 and upgraded 90% of its parts — incorporating new materials, advanced coatings, and improved manufacturing and inspection processes across the production line — the more recent organizational innovations reflect how its new investments in people, tools, processes, and operations have enabled growth. 

Much of that modernization has been driven by GE Aerospace’s approach to identifying and managing manufacturing constraints. This is reinforced by close partnership with the company’s external supply base. In the past two years, GE Aerospace has worked collaboratively with suppliers to strengthen relationships and build a more resilient supply chain, including stabilizing demand signals and deploying engineering and quality resources to help break bottlenecks. Together, this approach and these processes give GE Aerospace greater visibility into its supply chain, enabling targeted intervention and a shift from reactive recovery to proactively solving challenges before they become constraints.

The company also recently announced an agreement to acquire Consolidated Precision Products (CPP), a global manufacturer of castings. This is especially important because castings remain a constrained commodity across the industry, and expanding capability in that area helps strengthen supply resilience and support higher production rates. Of course, CPP is just part of the solution, and GE Aerospace will continue to rely on all of its external suppliers to grow capacity and meet demand.

Investing to Build Resilience and Scale Up 

Sustaining this pace of innovation has required significant resources behind the scenes. Since 2023, GE Aerospace has invested more than $600 million in manufacturing in its defense facilities. In addition, it has committed over $100 million to external suppliers to advance tooling and equipment, with the aim of strengthening capacity, stabilizing production schedules, and expanding delivery commitments. The company is also building further supply-chain resiliency through dual sourcing of critical components and targeted capacity investments, including significant investments in upgrades of critical parts to enable scaling across multiple defense engine lines, which will ultimately drive improved output. 

To make these improvements over a range of operations and at such scale, GE Aerospace has also drawn on artificial intelligence. Technicians applied AI technology in highly focused efforts on the F404 and F110 production lines this year, which gave them better visibility into supply chain challenges. Working both internally and with external suppliers, they’ve been able to identify risks, gaps, and potential bottlenecks much earlier in the process. 

This is a crucial factor in building resilience: addressing constraints before they can impact delivery. The downstream effects include an increase in material flow, supplier readiness, and coordination across the supply base. The company has built stronger supplier partnerships and gained insights into critical dependencies that help prepare the industrial base to sustain higher production. All of this has translated into a 50% increase in F110 output year over year since the second quarter of 2025, and a 15% increase in total defense engine output in the first half of 2026. 

“Artificial intelligence is changing how we build and sustain the F110,” says Shawn Warren, vice president and general manager of combat and trainer engines in GE Aerospace’s Defense & Systems business. “It’s giving our teams the ability to see problems before they become delays, and to move faster without sacrificing the reliability our Air Force customers depend on.”

The company has also expanded its use of AI-enabled predictive maintenance. And through a deepened partnership with Palantir, it is deploying agentic AI to support decision-making in aircraft sustainment and to streamline its own production processes.

Increasing F110 Output for Customers

Underpinning all of these efforts is FLIGHT DECK, GE Aerospace’s proprietary lean-based operating model, which has guided nearly every aspect of these operational improvements in F110 production. The aim of FLIGHT DECK is to systematically eliminate waste, optimize production flow, and sharpen cultural focus to consistently deliver maximum value through the eyes of the customer. On the F110 production line, this has translated into the deployment of engineering support and collaborations with suppliers, improving processes and eliminating delivery gaps to meet increased demand.

In a recent weeklong improvement push driven by FLIGHT DECK, the team cut overall production lead time for the F110 high-pressure compressor (HPC) forward shaft by roughly 60% by consolidating key processes and reducing the distances operators were traveling inside the manufacturing facility. And the company is building on these improvements to reduce lead time across the production line. 

Ultimately, through extensive investments, the implementation of AI, putting FLIGHT DECK into action, and fine-tuning the supply chain, GE Aerospace has strengthened its readiness to increase F110 output and advanced its capability for the future.

“Forty years in, the F110 keeps getting better, because we keep investing in it,” says Warren. “From AI on the production floor to FLIGHT DECK on the shop floor, every improvement we make comes back to one goal: getting engines to our Air Force customers faster, and keeping them flying longer.”