GE Aviation’s massive GE90 engine has surpassed 100 million flight hours. In November, the aircraft engine will mark 25 years in service. Under the wings of the Boeing 777 family, the GE90 engine reached the 100-million-hour mark averaging more than 4 million hours a year. To put this accomplishment in perspective:
- The GE90 engine’s 100 million hours equates to nearly 11,500 years of flying
- Over its 25-year span, the GE90 engine has flown approximately 55,726,866,160 miles*
- That’s 300 roundtrips to the Sun or 199 roundtrips to Mars
- During its lifetime, the GE90 engine has hauled approximately 143,274,960,000 pounds**
- That equates to 20,795 Saturn V rockets or 883 Washington Monuments
- At typical passenger seating for the Boeing 777-200ER and Boeing 777-300ER, about 2.5 billion passengers have flown on GE90-powered Boeing 777 airplanes
“The GE90 engine has proven to be extremely reliable for our customers, and we are very excited to celebrate the 100-million-hour achievement, said Mike Kauffman, GE Aviation’s GE90 program general manager. “This is a testament to all those involved in this milestone, including our dedicated product support team that will continue to maintain the GE90 for many years to come.”
Since entering service in 1995, GE has delivered more than 2,800 GE90 -94B and upgraded -115B engines to 70 operators around the world. The GE90 engine family powers all Boeing 777 models and is the exclusive powerplant on the 777-300, -200, and 777F.
Together, the engine powers more than 1,200 aircraft. It’s architecture and mechanical design have influenced every GE and CFM turbofan over the last 20 years, from the popular GEnx and record-selling CFM LEAP engine to the Passport for corporate jets and the next generation GE9X engine for the Boeing 777X.
The GE90-115B has been one of GE’s greatest technical achievements:
- It held the world-record at 127,900 pounds of thrust (lbf) for 13 years
- The GE90 engine powered a Boeing 777-200LR during what was once the world's longest flight by a commercial airliner, 13,422 miles in 22 hours, 42 minutes, flying from Hong Kong to London "the long way" over the Pacific, over the continental U.S., then over the Atlantic Ocean to London
- The GE90 is the first jet commercial engine to enter service with composite fan blades and inward opening bleed doors. A GE90-115B fan blade was exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art
- In 2015, the GE90 engine became the first commercial engine to incorporate an FAA-approved 3-D-printed part (T25 sensor)
The GE90-115B engine faces some of the toughest demands daily on a high-thrust commercial jet engine. Despite this, the engine has achieved the lowest maintenance burden to date through service bulletin terminating action acceleration and analytics-based field programs implementation. It also has a world class dispatch reliability rate of 99.97 percent.
