Flight Friday: CFM International's Engines Lead In Asia-Pacific

As Aero-Engines Asia-Pacific draws to a close, this week’s Flight Friday looks at narrowbody engine utilization by Asia-Pacific operators (which in this analysis excludes China and India operators).

Overall narrowbody utilization is down just over 3% in Asia-Pacific in the first quarter (Q1) of 2025 compared to Q1 2019.

This is a much narrower gap than the widebody utilization difference from last week’s analysis. The slight decline in cycles, or flights, cannot be attributed to a smaller in-service fleet, like the widebodies, as the narrowbody in-service fleet is 2.5% larger in 2025 compared to 2019.

When split by engine manufacturer, CFM International, by far, powers the greatest number of flights. In 2019, CFM-powered flights accounted for almost three-quarters of the flights, and in Q1 2025, CFM still accounts for 72% of flights, which aligns with the in-service fleet, also 72%.

The legacy CFM56 accounts for most of the in-service fleet and therefore the number of flights, with the Leap making up the rest of the fleet and utilization.

International Aero Engines accounts for 19% of the utilization in Q1 2025, which is down from the 22% that it used to represent during 2019. This exclusively refers to the legacy V2500, which has seen its in-service fleet decrease by almost 15% since 2019, due to it powering some of the aging Airbus A320 family aircraft that have either moved out of region or been retired.

Pratt & Whitney accounts for almost all the remaining utilization. The introduction of the PW1000G (GTF) into the Asia-Pacific fleet on A320neo family aircraft has led to there being a larger in-service fleet, almost 150% greater than the Pratt-powered narrowbody fleet back in 2019.  

This increase in fleet size is therefore reflected in the utilization growing from 3% back in 2019 to almost 8% today. Still hampered in part by GTF durability issues, Pratt utilization still has space to grow.

Rolls-Royce also powers a handful of narrowbody aircraft and contributes to the utilization, but this is a completely different story from last week’s widebody-focused Flight Friday, whereby Rolls-Royce was a regional leader.

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