GE wins the engine contract for UK’s newest helicopters

The British military’s newest helicopter fleet finally has an engine, closing a question that even reporters covering the program in real time couldn’t get UK officials to answer for months.

GE Aerospace announced July 14 that Leonardo selected its CT7-2E1 engine to power all 23 AW149 helicopters being built for the UK Ministry of Defence’s New Medium Helicopter program, filling in a detail that had gone conspicuously unaddressed in every official announcement since the aircraft itself was chosen back in March.

The AW149 won the £1 billion ($1.34 billion) NMH contract in March 2026 after a competition that started in 2021 and eventually narrowed to a single bidder, replacing the Royal Air Force’s Puma HC2 fleet, which was retired in March 2025 after decades of service in troop transport, disaster relief, and special operations support roles stretching from Cyprus to Afghanistan.

The AW149 itself is a twin-engine medium-lift helicopter with a maximum takeoff weight around 8.6 tonnes (9.5 tons), capable of carrying up to 16 fully equipped troops across a typical range of 500 nautical miles (926 kilometers) at cruise speeds near 145 knots (269 km/h), and it was selected specifically because a single aircraft type can now handle missions that previously required three separate helicopter fleets, simplifying the training, maintenance, and logistics chains the British armed forces have to manage.

What makes the engine choice matter beyond simple mechanics is that the AW149 has always been available with a choice between two competing engine families, GE’s CT7-2E1 or the Safran Aneto-1K, and which one an operator picks shapes everything from maintenance costs to how easily that operator can share spare parts and technical expertise with other militaries flying the same aircraft. GE’s engine has already logged more than 300 deliveries and over 500,000 flight hours worldwide across existing AW149 and AW189 operators, giving it a substantial track record to point to, and the company describes it as the only modular engine in its power class, meaning maintenance crews can pull and service individual engine modules directly in the field rather than shipping the entire engine back to a specialized depot for repairs.

“The CT7 engine’s track record as a highly reliable, workhorse powerplant is indisputable,” said Breanne Escalante, general manager of Rotorcraft and Turboprop Engines at GE Aerospace.

“We are pleased that the CT7-2E1 has been selected to power the UK NMH helicopter fleet and look forward to providing world-class support for these engines as well as all the T700/CT7 engines operated by the UK armed forces,” Escalante said.

That last point, about supporting every T700 and CT7 engine already in UK service, points to a genuine logistical advantage the CT7-2E1 selection creates. The CT7-2E1 belongs to GE’s broader T700/CT7 engine family, a lineage that has accumulated more than 130 million flight hours and powers 15 different military and civilian aircraft types worldwide, with over 25,000 engines delivered in total. British forces already operate a T700 variant on another aircraft in their fleet, and bringing the AW149 fleet under the same engine family means shared spare parts inventories, common maintenance training for ground crews, and simplified supply chains rather than standing up an entirely separate logistics pipeline for a competing engine type, a cost consideration that likely weighed heavily given how tightly stretched the UK’s overall defense budget has been throughout the NMH program’s long and occasionally troubled procurement history.

GE Aerospace will support Leonardo in delivering economic, social, and environmental benefit programs under the UK’s Social Value Model Act, a legal framework requiring major government contracts to demonstrate broader public benefit beyond simply delivering the purchased equipment. Under that framework, engine building, maintenance, and overhaul work for the NMH program, along with future export engines, will take place at StandardAero’s facility in Gosport, while Barnes Aerospace’s site in Newton Abbott will manufacture and export GE engine components, and the company will also draw on facilities in Cheltenham, Cardiff, Prestwick, and Gloucester to run outreach programs with educational institutions, apprenticeship pipelines, and employment equity initiatives.

The Ministry of Defence has said Leonardo’s Yeovil facility, where the AW149s themselves are being assembled, could become a hub for exporting the aircraft to other countries, with roughly 20 nations identified as having requirements for new medium-lift helicopters and potential export orders projected to generate more than £15 billion over the next decade. Every engine built or maintained domestically under this arrangement strengthens the case that a British-assembled AW149 comes with a fully domestic support ecosystem attached, a selling point that could matter to foreign buyers weighing the AW149 against competing designs from Airbus or other manufacturers.