The Pentagon awarded Rolls Royce’s U.S. subsidiary a contract, valued at $500 million, as the winner of the Commercial Engine Replacement Program (CERP) to replace the powerplant of B-52 bombers with F130 engines.
Details of the deal were posted on the Pentagon’s daily contracting notice site. Rolls-Royce’s contract with the U.S. Air Force is valued at $500,870,458 for the next six years, but if all options are executed, it could exceed $2.6 billion.
Rolls-Royce North America is proud to power the @USAirForce B-52 Stratofortress for the next 30 years! #AmericanMadeJetEngines pic.twitter.com/gyZ6rNyEPN
— Rolls-Royce America (@RollsRoyceNA) September 25, 2021
Specifically, this contract includes the procurement of 608 commercial engines, plus spare engines, associated support equipment and commercial engineering data, to enable maintenance activities. The place of the performance is Indianapolis, Indiana, and work is expected to be completed by September 23, 2038.
The F130 powerplant beat General Electric’s proposed CF34-10 and Pratt and Whitney’s PW800 and will replace one by one the aging P&W TF33s that equip (at a rate of 8 per aircraft) the current fleet of 76 B-52 strategic bombers, which became prohibitively expensive to maintain.
Rolls Royce F130
The company reports that the F130 engine (a militarized version of the BR725) and its commercial engine family have accumulated more than 27 million flight hours. The F130 is the perfect engine for the B-52, with proven reliability, excellent life-cycle cost and low integration risk. A variant of the Rolls-Royce engine selected to power the iconic B-52 is already in service with the USAF, powering the C-37 and E-11 BACN aircraft.
The F130 offers exceptional reliability with high mission availability and low maintenance requirements. Once installed, the F130 can remain in the wing for the entire expected service life of the B-52, without the need to remove it for major overhauls.
In addition, the F130 engine will provide much greater fuel efficiency, longer range and reduced tanker demand. More importantly, the engine is ready for integration using Rolls-Royce’s most advanced digital engineering tools.
Rolls-Royce will build and test the F130 engines at its Indianapolis, Indiana, facility following the recent completion of a $600 million investment to revitalize its manufacturing campus, providing one of the most technologically advanced manufacturing facilities worldwide. The B-52 CERP competition win creates demand for 650 engines to be produced in Indianapolis and will bring 150 new high-tech, high-skill jobs to the state of Indiana.
B-52, the century-old bomber
Following its in-depth modernization (part of which the re-engining program is crucial) the iconic Stratofortress will continue to play a key role in the USAF bomber structure for both conventional and nuclear strike missions.
Armed with a new class of nuclear-capable long-range hypersonic missiles, the B-52 will perform the strategic bombing mission, while the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider will fly stealth bombing missions in contested airspace.
With the new engines, the B-52 will be able to remain airborne, as a deterrent and relevant weapon system, well beyond 2050. Considering that the first B-52 had its rollout on March 18, 1954, we are looking at the possibility that the B-52 Stratofortress will reach 100 years of operational history. More than eloquent testimony to the excellence of its design.
