Rolls-Royce: F130 Engine for B-52 Passes CDR

Rolls-Royce: F130 Engine for B-52 Passes CDR

Rolls-Royce said on Friday that its F130 engine passed a U.S. Air Force Critical Design Review (CDR)–a step “clearing the way for final development, test, and production efforts to proceed and taking another step toward delivering the upgraded B-52J” to the service.

The Commercial Engine Replacement Program (CERP) and Radar Modernization Program (RMP) are the Air Force’s key modernization efforts for the Boeing B-52H bomber. The modernized bombers will carry the B-52J designation.

The F130’s blessing in CDR “is the culmination of over two years of detailed design work and close collaboration between teams at Rolls-Royce, the Air Force and Boeing,” Rolls-Royce said on Friday. “The engine testing program is on track to begin altitude testing in February 2025 at the U.S. Air Force Arnold Engineering Development Complex in Tullahoma, Tennessee.”

Rolls-Royce said on March 1 last year that it had begun testing the F130 at the company’s outdoor testing site at NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The testing at NASA Stennis “marked the first time F130 engines were tested in the dual-pod engine configuration of the B-52 aircraft,” the company has said, and the Rapid Twin Pod Tests, which finished over the summer, “played a key role in validating Rolls-Royce’s analytical predictions, further de-risking the integration of the F130 engine onto the B-52J and meeting test goals,” Rolls-Royce said on Friday.

In September 2021, the Air Force awarded Rolls-Royce a CERP contract worth potentially $2.6 billion through fiscal 2038 to outfit the B-52 with the F130 engine, based on Rolls-Royce’s commercial BR725 carried on Gulfstream G650 business jets.

Under CERP, the Air Force is moving to put the Rolls-Royce F130 engines on the bomber to replace the B-52H’s Pratt & Whitney TF33-PW-103 engines, which the Air Force has said it wants to retire by 2030.

Rolls-Royce has said it may deliver more than 600 F130s for the eight-engine B-52 under CERP to extend the life of the venerable B-52 another 30 years–an extension which may mean that the B-52 becomes a centenarian. Rolls-Royce is to build the engines in its Indianapolis plant. The company said that it has invested $1 billion in recent years to modernize its manufacturing, testing, and advanced technology facilities in Indiana.

The Rolls-Royce CERP win in 2021 was significant for the company. For CERP, the Air Force wanted a new, commercial B-52 engine up to 30 percent more fuel efficient than the TF33.

In July, the Air Force said that it is undertaking a cost reduction effort for CERP and the RMP, which had not reached but was abutting a significant Nunn-McCurdy unit cost breach of 15 percent over the baseline.

The military services must notify the congressional defense committees of such cost breaches.

A version of this story originally appeared in affiliate publication Defense Daily.

The post Rolls-Royce: F130 Engine for B-52 Passes CDR appeared first on Avionics International.

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