Flight Friday: How The Leap And GTF Issues Are Affecting Aircraft Utilization

This week’s Flight Friday looks at the effects caused by the engine issues with the CFM Leap and the Pratt & Whitney GTF (PW1000G).

The well-publicized issues that have been affecting these engines are being managed in different ways.

The CFM Leap has a “fuel nozzle” issue that seems to be well under control. The Leap number of ground days started to slowly increase from August 2022 but is hovering in the 17-18% bracket. To put it into context, the CFM56 in northern hemisphere summer 2019 had a 20% ground day rate, so anything under 20% could be deemed “business as usual” for aircraft operations.

The Pratt & Whitney GTF (specifically the PW1000G version that powers the Airbus A320neo family), has two dominant issues: the combustion/heat exchanger and the High-Pressure Turbine (HPT) blades. The HPT issue was announced in July 2023. Since then, we have seen the number of ground days grow from the mid-20s to almost one-third.

Operators were keen to get ahead of the HPT issue and started amending/decreasing their flight schedules accordingly. The GTF issue is expected to carry on through 2024. However, it does seem that Pratt now has a handle on the issue and hopefully the ground days remain reasonably constant. For context, ground days for the V2500 in northern hemisphere summer 2019 were around 12%, so the GTF, currently, is almost three times worse.

This data was put together using Aviation Week’s Tracked Aircraft Utilization tool.