Heather “Lucky” Penney: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Aerospace Advantage podcast, brought to you by PenFed. I’m your host, Heather “Lucky” Penney. Here on the Aerospace Advantage, we speak with leaders in the armed forces, industry, and other subject matter experts to explore the intersection of strategy, operational concepts, technology, and policy when it comes to air and space power.

It’s no secret that the Mitchell Institute is a big advocate for jet propulsion. It’s one of the most important technologies in the air power equation. Whether you’re going head-to-head with an enemy fighter, crossing an ocean on a mobility flight, or trying to make it back to base amidst bad weather at night, there’s nothing more important than having confidence in the engine that’s powering your airplane.

If you ask any military pilot, whatever the mission area, they’ll agree. It’s also one of the most overlooked parts of an aircraft, as the engine is normally buried deep inside an airframe or covered with a sleek cowling. The technology is so dependable these days that folks just expect them to work, and that’s a tribute to the skill and the dedication of the men and women who design, build, and sustain these [00:01:00] engines that people like you and me just assume perfection.

That said, we can’t take this position of strength for granted. Competitors like China are trying to catch up with their own designs. We’re in a propulsion race, and we can only preserve our lead if we continue to invest in new technologies and produce and field at scale. So with that, it’s my pleasure to introduce Peter Sommerkorn, Vice President for Military Development Programs at Pratt & Whitney.

Peter, welcome.

Peter Sommerkorn: Thanks for having me.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: And we’ve also got Pratt & Whitney’s Head of Gatorworks, Chris Hugill. Chris is in charge of the company’s fast forward-leaning prototyping arm. Chris, great to have you here.

Chris Hugill: Great to be here.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Okay. So Peter, we’re gonna start with you. Help us understand what falls in your portfolio, because developing next-generation propulsion is a seriously cool business.

Peter Sommerkorn: If I think about Pratt & Whitney, our military engines today support some of the most advanced military aircraft in the world. We power fighters, bombers, transport, and tankers. We have over 7,500 engines across 30-plus global operators.

And so within that Pratt & Whitney portfolio I have responsibility for our development activities and programs. And so this effectively spans everything from small technology, advanced technology that we’re trying to incubate, all the way to, I’ll say, still development programs, but think, like, your sixth gen platforms and things like that, that are more discreet programs that we’re working on.

And what I think is really interesting is that development spans our entire portfolio. I talked about fighters, bombers, tankers, and everything in between, and we have development that infuses everywhere across that portfolio. And we like to say that we do everything from 50 pounds of thrust to 50,000 pounds of thrust.

And so for us, it’s covering everything that’s advanced technology here.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Awesome. So Chris, tell us more about Gatorworks. It sounds like a really fascinating part of the company.

Chris Hugill: Yeah, I think it is. We built Gatorworks back in 2018, really in part to change how we work. The need to innovate faster, transition technology, and get the capability to the warfighter faster was really clear.

And at the same time, we were looking at, expanding our portfolio of engines with a whole host of opportunities in new markets and with some new customers. Some of that was in the smaller engine space by compared to our classical large engine fighter business. The motivation and focus was well timed. Today, Gatorworks is Pratt & Whitney’s rapid prototyping development arm for much of our military work. We’re maturing technology, demonstrating it, and now transitioning that into production for a range of programs and customers.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Okay, so Chris, Peter had mentioned that you could develop new technology, but then you would seek to figure out where that might make sense to insert into other engines.

So does your team also work on inserting new capability enhancements into existing designs and production, or are you in Gatorworks just focused on those next-gen efforts?

Chris Hugill: We’re doing both. You know, key to our tech development strategy really is application forwards and backwards across the portfolio. Fielded engines, engines in production today, as well as on the development front. For us, that, you know, has a few key benefits, right? First, we can leverage scale, especially when we’re making large investments, and second, it provides a continuum of ready, kind of on-the-shelf technology that we can [00:04:00] bring forward at the right time when the customer’s looking for it.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Okay. So let’s talk about an area that’s of particular interest in military propulsion for us at least, because collaborative combat aircraft right now are leveraging existing engine technology, typically business jet technology or those jets that have been developed specifically for drones. But, I think we might need to have an expanded marketplace in terms of what the potential for engines could be if we’re gonna see CCA deliver the capability that we might expect for them. ‘Cause for the longest times, folks have tried to make the most powerful, dependable jet engines, ’cause if you look at the difference between a 1960s era engine, phew, boy, I’ve flown some of those. It’s a little sporty. Or the ones that are coming off the line today, the arrows all kind of point in one way, more reliable, more thrust, and more efficient. But as we mentioned, CCA now introduces new mission objectives, especially given we might operate them in different ways. And, whether or not that’s 50, I don’t know that we’re gonna go to 50,000 pounds of thrust, but having that scalable level of thrust in a way that’s reliable, affordable, is using designs and prices obviously a new variable.

So how are you taking this new challenge?

Peter Sommerkorn: I think that’s a good question, and I think it’s kind of a combination of the way we’ve done things and what we’ve learned in our 100-year history and also looking to do things in new ways. And so what I mean by that, I mentioned that Pratt’s been around for about 100 years, so we have a long history of the classic engine design and technology development that you alluded to. At the same time, the world’s changing quickly, and so we have to take a new approach to how we put these things together. So our existing engines, they fly for thousands of hours. They were designed everything for different types of missions and applications. And these CCAs and effectors, as you say, these might fly for a fraction of that. They have a much more reduced life. And so for us, there’s, it’s important to remember there’s a wide range even of CCAs. CCAs is kind of a large term…

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Umbrella term.

Peter Sommerkorn: Yeah, exactly. So you’ve got anything from effectors that maybe are a one-way trip versus the other end of the spectrum where you’ve got pretty exquisite applications. And so the needs within the CCA umbrella can vary pretty widely. And so for us, it’s thinking about how we have to trade capability that we have engineered into our products for years. How can we use that differently to meet the new mission? So I think Chris maybe is good to talk about this, but it might be something like trading some of the life that we have designed into our products for other capabilities that are needed for this mission. Chris, you wanna add?

Chris Hugill: Yeah, exactly right. You know, it’s clear that that mix of speed, cost, capability that we’ve been talking about, you know, for CCA and similar programs is new and different to classically how we’ve looked at engine development.

On the propulsion side, I think you’ve mentioned it, you know, our solutions span derivatives of commercial engines all the way now to new clean sheet designs. And so while different solutions in that space, right, there are important similarities. I’ll give a couple examples. You know, first, CCA mission lives give us flexibility in how we potentially trade some life, some durability for some performance. We’re developing these engines at a full digital ecosystem and doing that live with our customers. And third, plans for capacity and rate production, something we used to think about later in the life-cycle, have now moved way left. So even as we’re doing clean sheets design, we’re thinking about where would we manufacture this, how are we setting up our supply chain to be ready to ramp with speed.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Oh my gosh, so you’re talking about supply chain. Boy, that’s a pet rock for us here at Mitchell, but that’s not where I wanna dig into. What I wanna dig into is what you mentioned regarding the digital ecosystem. How do technologies like digital twins, digital computer design, how do those provide you new opportunities in this work?

Peter Sommerkorn: Digital capabilities in engineering are incredibly important, and we mentioned that the world’s changing pretty quickly, and a key part of how we react to that is through these digital tools and capabilities that are being developed. Digital requirements, they’re becoming standard across all customer applications and programs, and it’s, for us, it’s the way that we have to operate day-to-day, not something that we will do here in this one spot to address this one issue and do it in one-off instances.

I mentioned that Pratt has a long history of developing jet engines and propulsion, and we’re really proud of that. And the thing that’s interesting to me about these new digital techniques is we’ve gotta combine… We can’t forget what we’ve learned how to do. We’ve gotta take our old expertise, and we’ve gotta combine it with these new tools and approaches.

And we’ve seen it to be pretty incredibly effective when we do that. There are a few examples that I’ll point to, some digital tools or things that we do. So number one, we look at, we have collaborative digital environments with our customers, so Air Force customers, specifically in the examples I’m thinking of, where we are working live in these digital ecosystems to design and lay out test procedures and things like that. And our customers have real-time access where they’re sitting, and they can follow along with us. They wanna look at something. It no longer means that information flow happens in a dedicated design review every three months or six months or something like that. So we get real-time feedback and make sure that we are being much more efficient in how we develop some of these capabilities. I think the next thing that I would point to is that the model-based systems engineering tool set, it allows us to rapidly assess impacts across the engine architecture and at any phase of the program.

So again, for example, if you think of an old world where we would do a design turn, and then you’d have a big meeting with a bunch of people, and they would all provide input and have a discussion, and then you’d go make some changes, and then you’d go build and run a test, and then come back and have another discussion, that could take weeks or months. In the new digital world, if we are building all of these models in this digital ecosystem, we can have a discussion, and you can tweak something, and it will flow through the entire model. And you can model or you can simulate what that will look like from a performance standpoint, and you can run through several iterations of that in weeks instead of months, and it significantly cuts down the development timeline, as well as some of the risk that we’re dealing with.

I think the last thing that I would point to is that a centralized, we call it authoritative source of truth is incredibly important because in a world where you don’t have this, there’s information living in different places, and you’ve got to make sure that you don’t have disconnects that cause problems. These things happen all the time and cause inefficiencies. I’d say at the least, and sometimes can cause big problems when you go to test or develop a new technology. And so having everything linked together with a single authoritative source of truth makes us much more efficient and reduces turn backs and makes this whole process happen much more effectively.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Peter, I do want to follow up with you on the discussion of digital engineering and model-based simulation and how you are sharing those threads with a customer because I think that this really has an important piece of not just validating the performance of the engine, but performance of the weapon system. Because as every pilot knows, things from, like, the wing design and the drag index is gonna impact performance, and if you don’t have the right specific fuel consumption numbers, that’s gonna put your range out of whack and all of those other things. So are you actually seeing that the digital engineering that you’re doing in your engines is enhancing the total performance analysis of the system for the customer?

Peter Sommerkorn: So the, the simple answer is yes. As weapon systems continue to develop and get more complex, it’s really that it’s a system and everything interacts together. And so the propulsion, while being a key part of that, is one part of that, and there are all sorts of interactions. I can think of a couple of examples recently where we’ve been working with an airframer as they’ve been developing a new system, and they will be looking at what’s needed. They’ll be reacting to some of the analysis that they’re performing of how different subsystems interact or perhaps different needs that they have for the airframe. And they’ll have a challenge, right? I’ll keep this fairly generic here, but they’ll have a challenge where perhaps something that they need to do or carry is going to require more size and cause more drag in one part of the envelope. And as we work together with them in real time in a digital environment, we can look at our engine and say, “Okay, we can tweak this here and this here and actually fix your thrust capability in this parts of the envelope and provide more where you need it to perform this specific piece of the mission.” And it happens in real time. This sort of thing used to take, you know, weeks, again if you look at how the interchanges would happen. It’s real time, and I’ll say I’ve been pretty, pretty pleased looking at how our teams do that and hearing the feedback from the airframers we’re working with saying, “Wow, great. We can work through an issue that comes up in a matter of a couple of days as opposed to weeks or months.”

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Yeah, no, that’s actually really exciting. I mean, one of the things I’m thinking about historically is you go back to the Century Series, like the F-102 to the F-106. I mean, we didn’t have that ability to do that kind of digital engineering design analysis, and so you have the 102, which is, was expected to meet certain performance parameters, but it simply couldn’t. It was actually an airframe-type issue. But they didn’t know that and they couldn’t do the analysis between the engine and the airframe. And so there had to be a big redesign of both to get to the F-106, or you take a look at the F-105. The airframe was designed for an engine that couldn’t come along just in time, and so it was really delayed. So it’s exciting to see that there’s this, push-pull, this, this teamwork between the airframers and you as the engine designer to be able to help collaboratively solve problems. It’s gonna be especially important when you think about how we also then put on new sensors and avionics and capabilities there because as you well know, SWaP-C, size, weight, power, and cooling, is a physical attribute that is largely driven by the engine.

So, Chris, one of the challenges I think that’s really unique to the CCA program is that it might encompass a broad range of aircraft types and therefore engine types, right? So some CCA might be closer to fighters, others might look more like reusable cruise missiles. So that’s actually a really huge requirements and performance range.

How does this shape your thinking? Because I guess we would see a family of systems, family of capabilities that speak to different desired attributes.

Chris Hugill: Yeah, CCA is certainly dynamic. You know, with some of that uncertainty, you know, first we’re looking at tools like operation analysis to start to connect the range of those scenarios and certainly the outcomes we all desire right directly to the capability and technology that Pratt can provide.

This helps us in a couple ways, right, as we look at early priority and investment decisions. It also helps us navigate some of that natural uncertainty that I think will continue to persist for a little bit here as we get further into CCA.

By contrast, I’d say, though, there are also some, you know, points of really good clarity and exciting progress. You know, we’re leveraging mature, you know, certified commercial engine technology to reduce development timelines, cost, and risk. You know, first example of that is our work with Northrop Grumman, delivering a Pratt PW-500 engine for the YFQ-48A and their Talon Blue CCA aircraft. You know, our team started with a production engine backed by 25-plus million hours, invested in the validation and capability enhancements that were required for that airframe, um, and moved quickly to support the integration. You know, that approach, I think, will be common as we look you know, further down the road into CCA, demonstrating the value of adapting proven technology, allowing us to move quick, develop quickly, and balance speed, cost, and capability across the board.

Second, we’re investing and collaborating with the government on a new family of small engines, the Valox family of engines from 500 to 1,800 pounds of thrust, purpose-built for the mix of weapons and small CCA applications.

That family provides a common modular approach that will allow us to tailor propulsion to different CCAs, autonomous systems, and even effectors as we look into the future and capability that’s required.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Ooh, I’m really glad you mentioned that, effectors, like munitions, right? And obviously, effectors don’t have to be kinetic, but a new area that we’re seeing propulsion demand for actually ties to munitions, especially a lot of the standoff varieties that might be called upon to fly very long distances, right? I mean, so this is the Pacific problem. This might see a jet engine offer a better solution than a rocket. What sort of opportunities do you see in that area?

Chris Hugill: Yeah, we’ve seen that air breathing propulsion, you know, specifically rotating detonation engines can really unlock very long range distances, you know, you referenced. We continue to progress some of our work on RDEs with rapid design iterations. Have now tested engines that are offering more speed and performance than even we originally predicted. So real exciting on that front. And really the architecture with no moving parts by compared to a classical turbine engine, with a different cycle and a different way in which these engines produce thrust. You know, we’re converting that fuel into thrust and range at a performance level that we think is a game changer for range.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: No moving parts, I mean, like, different, that actually brings up so many questions I have. So Peter, that’s really exciting, like the, everything from the RDE to the Valox family. What are the deciding factors that determine when and where Gatorworks chooses to pursue new opportunities?

For example, for years there were just simply one or two vendors that spoke to the smaller end of the military jet engine market, kinda like the drones or cruise missiles, but now you’re deciding to engage there when traditionally Pratt & Whitney has been really focused on the larger, more thrusty, reliable engines. And it’s really good ’cause it’s gonna drive more options for the warfighter, plus better pricing and faster innovation is normally driven by competition. What drove Pratt to enter this space?

Peter Sommerkorn: That’s a good question. When we consider, as we’ve been talking about, the space that we’re in is changing rapidly. It’s very dynamic. It’s important for us to think about how we approach different opportunities. And in my mind, there are three things that we consider, and it’s kind of the intersection of these three things that will drive us towards something. So first, you’ve gotta look at a need for the warfighter. If this doesn’t help the warfighter, then it’s not something that needs to be pursued or makes sense, and it’s gotta make a difference for them.

The second thing that we think about is, does it fit with the core of what we do well and where we have, I’ll say, differentiated expertise? We’re good at solving complex technology problems in the propulsion arena, working with systems and providing systems that allow capability to the warfighter. So it’s gotta be something that fits in the core of what we do well.

And then the third is there’s gotta be an economic business case for it. So we’ll look at making sure that we can do whatever needs to be done efficiently in a way that provides good value to the warfighter, the customer, and uses our customer’s dollars well.

So you put those three things together, and we look at the world that we’re in right now and the environment that we’re in, those things come together in a lot of these small engine dynamics that we’ve been talking about, and becomes pretty attractive opportunity where we think we can provide something that would be useful.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Peter, we just talked about your choice to get into small engines, but what about a program like Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion? How are your teams each involved with that effort?

Peter Sommerkorn: Good question. I think we talked earlier about the fact that within the development portfolio, we’ve got a wide range of things, small early stage technologies, but also larger programs that are more like your classic engine program. And NGAP, Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion, looks like that. It’s got a dedicated team that is focused on that. It’s a very high priority. I will note that a lot of these technologies that are flowing into NGAP many of them were incubated in places like our Gatorworks organization, and we put it all together in this large engine program. Our XA103 is our NGAP engine for the NGAP program, and at its core, NGAP is about ensuring that the U.S. Air Force has the advanced propulsion technology needed for future air superiority platforms. Our XA103 engine is designed to deliver a range, greater range, improve survivability, stronger thermal management, and more mission flexibility. And unlike a traditional engine, an adaptive engine can adjust for how it performs based on the needs of the mission. It can optimize for efficiency or power or thermal capacity. I like to use the example of it’s kind of like a sport, a car when you can put it in sport mode or eco mode. It allows us to maximize for range when you’re in a cruise portion of a mission and then…

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Think about driving to the fight.

Peter Sommerkorn: You got it. Exactly.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: And then you’ve got the opportunity to have the high thrusties when you have to maneuver, deliver weapons, engage, escape, like, all of those things. So it’s really interesting having the NGAP capabilities allow you to get, extract so much more performance out of a fixed fuel volume, right?

I mean, 12,000 pounds, 18,000 pounds, 20,000 pounds. You can get so much more out of every drop of fuel because of the NGAP technology and that ability to swap between eco and sport, right?

So here at Mitchell, we have long been proponents of doing everything we can to move as quickly through the NGAP program to get to a point where we’re actually fielding and operating these engines.

So where do we stand? Can you give us an NGAP update? Because it’s a really important initiative.

Peter Sommerkorn: Yeah, you bet. So as I mentioned, we’re executing the NGAP program. And as I look at our progress, earlier this year we had a design review that we completed successfully. It was a fully digital assembly readiness review is what it’s called. And the review validated our engine design and manufacturing approach, and it allows our team to transition from designing in a fully digital environment to procuring and producing the physical hardware so that we can run a prototype. And so now we are on track for running that prototype towards the end of this decade.

I’ll also add that the technology in NGAP, as I mentioned, we have technology infusion from other places in Gatorworks, but also the things we’re developing in NGAP as this new cutting-edge approach to propulsion will diffuse into other areas of our portfolio and to other engine platforms. So it’s a case where we’re trying to make sure we’re using the technology we’re developing and where we’re collaborating with the government and getting the most benefit everywhere that we can for that.

Also important to mention that the team has been using an advanced digital engineering approach from day one on NGAP. We’ve seen some of these benefits we’ve talked about earlier. We’ve seen them show up in NGAP, and we look, we’re looking to continue to compound that and accelerate that type of a benefit.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: That’s really exciting that you’re gonna be able to really spread the innovations and the advanced technologies from NGAP into the other family of systems, and that’s gonna be great for all of the Pratt & Whitney customers. On another point regarding existing designs, like the F135 for the F-35, How does your dedicated F-135 Pratt team work to innovate, engineer, and then insert capability enhancements? ‘Cause things like, for example, the engine core upgrade, that’s a really important piece for the F-35.

Chris Hugill: It is, and very much so in the same manner, right? Our partnership with our customers is super key here, and the timing of technology readiness really with capability the warfighter needs. So, the F-135 engine core upgrade is a great example. The US government and the international F-35 partners selected the F-135 ECU for the additional power and thermal management we know is required for the future of the F-35 and the capability and missions it will fly. It’s fast, it’s effective, it’s low risk as we look at Block 4 and beyond, and importantly, it’s designed as a depot-level upgrade. So we need to be mindful of how we actually incorporate and sustain this in the fleet and across all variants and leveraging the F-135 supply chain. We talked a little bit about supply chain earlier. It’s important that that sustainment network and infrastructure stay in place, resulting in savings of cost and certainly time for our customers.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Now this might be a silly question, but when you say it’s a depot-level upgrade, does that mean you’re taking existing 135s that don’t have the ECU, and then you’re installing, so you’re inserting the ECU into those existing engines?

Chris Hugill: Yes. As a modular upgrade, we can maintain the pieces that are serviceable. It can go back in the fleet and incorporate the technology that is in the ECU core at the depot, quickly get that hardware back to the field.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Oh, so important because we can’t get to those advanced capabilities unless we have the thermal capabilities as well as the power generation, and the ECU is the secret sauce to making all that happen for the F-135.

Peter, swapping over to civil propulsion, how are you really advancing the innovation there? Because we’re seeing tons of advancements in the market, and you’re a technology leader with things like the geared turbofan. Important because a lot of the civil engines are what we use with our mobility aircraft.

So, how does your team engage in that area?

Peter Sommerkorn: Yeah, great question. I’ll say that we invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year in developing technology. Some of it is for commercial applications, civil applications. Some of it is for military applications. Sometimes the basic technology solution is agnostic to where you’re going to put it. And the important thing here is that we continuously leverage both the military and commercial technology and programs to continuously improve and develop our design tools and the things that we offer in our products. And this results in speed and cost efficiency. There are several examples I can think of, some even at the top level when you think of an engine program. For example, a derivative of our commercial PW4000 engine powers the KC-46 Pegasus. Similarly, a PW2000 powers the C-17 Globemaster III. And at the technology and module level, there are numerous examples where we’ve developed something in the commercial world that transports over to the military side, and vice versa.

And so for us, it’s how we can be more efficient and how we can be more effective in developing technology faster, use the entire breadth of our portfolio to do that.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: No, it’s really exciting. And as you know, the Air Force mobility community is looking at a new class of airlifters and refuelers. And airframe solutions would, could involve major innovation leaps, like a blended-wing body, or they could follow more established design paths. Regardless, it’s a major opportunity for giving our mobility airmen a major injection of new propulsion technology. And how are you looking at that kind of opportunity?

Chris Hugill: We’re staying really close to the developments, you know, both on next-gen tanker and transport, NGAS and NGAL. Concepts ranging from traditional tube and wing to blended-wing bodies, which you mentioned are exciting.

At Pratt & Whitney, we are super excited to be part of the JetZero demonstrator effort and the critical work to integrate an engine, you know, here very near term, on an entirely new airplane. It’s been a minute since we brought a new plan form to development or potentially to the fleet.

It is, though, I think, a little early to predict how future tanker and transport may shake out, but we’ve studied a whole host of options, you know, on the propulsion front from things that look to be derivatives of commercial engines in production today to some pretty clean sheet designs that really reach for the latest technology, some of that technology even coming out of programs like NGAP.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: No, and you know, everything that you’re doing with digital engineering and the way that you’ve demonstrated your ability to partner with airframers and partner with the customer gives them, I think, more optionality in terms of understanding what type of engine they need, the timelines that they’re on, how that integrates with their airframe, and does it give them the performance that they want.

So, whether discussing mobility, fighters, or bombers, one of the biggest performance drivers in next gen solutions will likely tie to extending range. And we kind of mentioned this when we were talking about NGAP, ’cause the Pacific is a huge theater, and propulsion is inextricably tied to the question of range because it’s all about, you know, how fast you go, because distance is time, and it’s also how much gas you got.

So how do you look at that reality from a challenges and opportunity perspective? Because no matter what the aircraft is, we need to stretch its legs.

Peter Sommerkorn: Absolutely. The discussion around range is something that if anyone’s paying any attention, they’ve been hearing pretty frequently for the last several years. And it’s a tough challenge, but the way that I think about it and the way that we think about it is that a challenge, it sounds cliché to say, but a challenge is really an opportunity. And so, if I think historically things that Pratt has done, the F119 engine, which is in the F-22, it had some pretty novel things that were tough to figure out at the time. It super cruises, it has thrust vectoring nozzles. Those are things that were challenging to design and develop and ultimately put out as a capability. And so I think about this question about range similarly. It’s an opportunity for us to show how we can take all of the desired requirements and capabilities and balance them.

And so range specifically is very important. The NGAP program that we talked about is critical because those core technologies are the foundation of what is going to allow us to provide more range across the entire portfolio. But I also think it’s an opportunity for us because it’s in, I’ll say, the context of everything that’s needed in a sixth gen world.

We talk about sixth gen a lot, and to me, the simplest way I explain it is that sixth gen is about providing all of the key capabilities at the same time. So it’s about range. If you don’t have range, it’s not gonna be, it’s not gonna matter and be effective. But you’ve gotta have range while we’re providing all of the power offtake for all of the mission systems and sensors, and while we’re providing the survivability that’s required for pretty difficult threat environments, and providing the thrust to deliver the missions.

And so for us, we look at that, that range piece, it’s part of showing how we can do all of this together, and this new technology in NGAP and elsewhere in our Gatorworks portfolio is pretty exciting as we’re starting to see use cases where you can do all of it.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: I’m really glad you said survivability. Enough said about that. So Chris, you know, how’s Gatorworks looking at this?

Chris Hugill: Very similar. I was gonna double down on the survivability piece. As these aircraft…

Heather “Lucky” Penney: Okay, so do say more then.

Chris Hugill: Yeah. So you’re, look, as these aircraft get where they’re going, right, they need to survive, they need to be able to persist, right? The mission systems of the future we know are gonna be very electrical power hungry, and we are going to be able to provide a step change in electrical power generation when needed, right? That mostly comes from the engine. I see this as an area where we can efficiently tailor engines or really incorporate additional power generation that could be a game changer. We’re already starting to have those conversations, inside RTX, across Collins and Raytheon, looking at the mission systems of the future and taking those potential requirements early into the design considerations as we look at future propulsion systems.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: So as you’re looking at those future propulsion systems, typically we think about the long investment cycles, and what you’re innovating is complex, and it’s akin to running a marathon, not a sprint, but we need capability faster.

So what can the government do, and what can you do internally to help shorten these cycles to boost that agility and have faster turns? I mean, I think we’ve spoken a lot about the digital engineering and how you have that partner process, and how having those real-time reviews can drive a lot of that time down, but what else do you need?

Peter Sommerkorn: Yeah. I think that a question of what can the government do, the government’s got all kinds of pressures that they also have to deal with and a lot of considerations. I think in terms of helping us continue to develop technology and deliver capability and to shorten these development cycles to deliver it faster, the biggest thing in my mind that helps is a steady demand signal, and that comes in a lot of different ways, and again, the government’s got to deal with a lot of different pressures. But as we are able to have a steady demand signal, so I’ll give you a very real example. We have a workforce that a big piece of it has a very highly specialized skillset and does some, some pretty impressive things. And being able to keep that workforce engaged, working on the types of things that their skillset enables, allows us to maintain a workforce that can deliver capability faster.

And so by keeping that demand signal steady and then that also allows us to make resourcing decisions and investment decisions, and, it ultimately is a much more efficient way for us to deliver the products and capabilities that are needed.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: I’m so glad you said that. I mean, that is the same drumbeat that we’ve been beating as well, because if we don’t get a steady demand signal, I mean, you can’t surge your workforce. As you mentioned, they’re very highly skilled, in some cases very niche. You can’t pay them to twiddle their thumbs, and if they are, they’re actually getting rusty ’cause they’re falling back. You have to exercise that workforce in order for them to stay at the level of quality that we need them to. And then swapping them around back and forth between programs is incredibly disruptive and creates all sorts of turbulence for your other programs. So, I mean, we need to buy, we need to provide a stable demand signal, a demand signal in force. So onesies and twosies are not gonna keep teams fed. They’re not gonna keep the lights on. And so multi-year production contracts to me is a key element of that. Maximum rates is also a key element to that because just like you can’t pay your workforce to sit still, you can’t pay for an empty production factory to keep the lights on and the heat on, anything like that.

And then here’s the piece that I think folks really don’t understand. You have to get the engines into the field and operate them, put them in the hands of the operators in the airframes that they’re gonna be in, in order to learn how they work in the real world. I mean, the digital twin is fantastic, but it only goes so far because you don’t see the real effects of sand in the core or how pilots are actually flying and abusing those engines or what happens when it’s put in the hands of a level three, level five maintainer.

And so, and also, we, sometimes we have infant mortality on parts that we just simply cannot predict. We have to field the engines. So R&D is great, but you’ve got to get to production, and you’ve got to put it in the airframes, and you’ve got to put them in the hands of the pilots.

Chris Hugill: You said it great. You know, we’re testing fast, learning fast, and as you added, we need to get product into the field fast.

That same talented workforce we talked about just a second ago, they want to work in that digital ecosystem. Those that have spent time there want to stay there. No one wants to work in ’90s technology anymore. And so while that is an underpinning of, you know, a lot of the conversation in A&D, it’s simply how we do work today which is exciting. We’re seeing the benefits of it, and the customers are now as well.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: No, that’s super cool. Okay, so, for the both of you, if we sit down in 10 years what major accomplishments would you hope to have completed? So you’re, we’re sitting down here, we’re reconvening. What are you gonna say, like, “Man, that was a good one. We’re excited we got that one done.”

Peter Sommerkorn: Yes, it’s interesting you ask that question. I actually go maybe a little more big picture and philosophical, but if I think about 10 years from now, that if I think about what I would like to hope we have accomplished, honestly, it is maintaining our propulsion advantage versus our near peers. And propulsion has been a differentiator for the last 70 years for the United States. And it enables us to protect our interests and accomplish things that would be very difficult to do without that, and we have threats to that now. There are other parties that are trying very hard to catch up and to nullify that differentiation, that advantage that we have.

And so when we talk about NGAP, and we talk about all this new technology, and to me, if I think about a world 10 years from now, if we’ve done our jobs well and we’re successful, we’re able to look back and say, “We still have an advantage at differentiation and propulsion,” which then leads to a pretty significant advantage overall in our place in the world.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: No, it’s super important because, you know, we talk about logistics and maintainability, especially with the tyranny of distance and the ACE operation and stuff like that. I mean, growing up as a baby fighter pilot, it was drilled into my noggin that our engines were one of our core advantages. It wasn’t just the fancy avionics and weapons that we had, but, you know, vis-a-vis at the time, the Russians, you know, we were taking a look at the Sukhois and the MiGs.

You know, we knew that their engines couldn’t perform. We knew that their engines had limitations on afterburner. We knew that their engines broke. They had to treat their engines like batteries ’cause they just didn’t have the reliability, the maintainability, or the life cycles that our engines had. So we knew that when we went over bad guy land, we could trust our engines, which meant we could trust our aircraft. We didn’t have to have any of those worry beads sitting in the back of our cognitive space. And we now see that the Chinese have been leaning on the Russians for their engine technology, and now they’re beginning to potentially surpass those production and design capabilities.

So when we talk about propulsion advantage, when I look about with what we need to give the kids who are in the cloth of our country, it is absolutely that.

Chris Hugill: Well said. You know, this used to be a 10-year long cycle business. No one can really afford that any longer. You know, through partnership and changing how we work, you know, that cycle needs to be just a handful of years.

I’d hope to, you know, reflect 10 years from now that we’ve done it two to three times over and that we’ve been successful getting capability in the hands of the warfighter.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: I’m, you know, I’m glad you said the long cycle business and how can we be more adaptive and deliver new designs faster because as we look at new types of munitions, loiter munitions, cruise missiles, CCA, and all sorts of autonomy, we may need to have perhaps small batch engines that are rapidly built, rapidly fielded, and then iterated on as we go through that kind of life cycle. And so it seems like you guys are really leaning into the future there.

Thank you so much. It was really great to have you for this conversation. We look forward to the next one.

Peter Sommerkorn: Thanks for having us. It was great.

Chris Hugill: Appreciate the time. Great to be here.

Heather “Lucky” Penney: And with that, I’d like to extend a big thank you to our guests for joining in today’s conversation.

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