How GE Aerospace Engineers Used Science to Solve an Engine Durability Problem with CFM LEAP Engines

GE Aerospace's new Services Technology Acceleration Center (STAC) will enable more efficient repairs and supply chain solutions. It will also serve as a hub for the development of new ways to automate services using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

Loren Finnerty manages more than 300 shop floor workers and engineers at GE Aerospace’s giant Asheville plant in North Carolina, where thousands of advanced composite components are produced every year for GE jet engines. Finnerty’s ability to grasp fine detail and never lose sight of the bigger picture has earned her a reputation as one of GE’s shop floor gurus. She’s chalked off nearly 20 years at GE businesses, using her engineering, people, and project management skills to enhance safety, motivate teams, and boost production and efficiency everywhere she goes.

Remembering Jim Krebs, aerospace visionary. He helped develop some of GE’s most important engines and was among a group of aerospace visionaries who propelled the world into the jet age on both the commercial and military sides.

From Light Bulbs to Jet Engines describes our technology journey from Thomas Edison’s first electrical devices to GE steam turbines and turbosuperchargers to America’s first jet engine. The 20th century’s two global wars created aviation challenges for GE to tackle and ultimately shaped GE Aviation into the global thriving business it is today.  

A group of southern Ohio elementary students recently got a unique opportunity to learn about math and science directly from Adam Savage, former co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters. GE Aviation’s Peebles Test Operation invited the nearby Peebles Elementary FIRST LEGO League team to meet Savage while he was on site filming a GE YouTube video that will come out this summer.

Aviation’s mach 1 oxidation facility in Lynn, Massachusetts is a unique and significant operation that still utilizes the original test cell that validated America’s first jet engine (the GE 1-A, circa 1940) to help determine what coatings and alloys are best suited for today’s engine parts.

Rudy Bryce, GE Aviation’s TrueChoice™ Transitions and Used Material Leader, offers insights on optimal maintenance and material actions at any point in the engine lifecycle.

How long is 91,000 years? Go back that far in the history of the earth and the Sahara was a wet and fertile plateau. It’s also the cumulative amount of time that the world’s most hardest-working jet engine, the CFM56, has spent in the air since its first commercial flight on a DC-8 Super 70 passenger jet in 1981.