GE Aerospace's soaring ambitions in India
The world's leading aircraft engine maker expects to be in the thick of both India's commercial and military aviation growth

GE Aviation, General Electric"s aviation arm, which will soon become an independent company, GE Aerospace, has big plans to ramp up its Indian operations.
The company is seeking to consolidate its position as the engine supplier of choice as India’s commercial airliners place record orders for hundreds of planes with demand for air travel soaring in the subcontinent post Covid.
GE Aerospace, whose Indian engineering team already plays a central role in developing its engines, including those that go on the larger, ‘wide-body’ aircraft, expects that India’s airlines will also buy more of such aircraft as international travel picks up too.
But also, on the military front, GE engines are expected to go into India’s second-generation light combat aircraft (LCA). And discussions are reportedly at very advanced stages for GE to help India to make those engines locally, via Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.
Even as this copy goes to print, an important objective for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s June 22 Washington visit is said to be finalising this deal, according to an exclusive Reuters report.
From semiconductors and electronics to nuclear energy, India’s ‘aatmanirbhar’ push to become a more global player in hi-tech manufacturing and opening itself up more to foreign investment, is finding favour with the western democracies’ strategy to isolate Russia—an important defence and oil supplier to India—and reduce their dependence on Chinese manufacturing.
America may sign off on a deal for GE Aerospace to help HAL build the GE414 engine in India for the LCA Mk-II, according to Reuters. And Germany’s Thyssenkrupp is bidding to partner India’s Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders to supply six submarines to the Indian Navy, according to a recent Bloomberg report.
India is also developing an advanced medium combat aircraft (AMCA), which could eventually become a 5th-generation fighter aircraft. And various media reports suggest GE is collaborating with India on this as well, although an eventual engine supplier is yet to be finalised.
On the civil aviation front, “buying the latest LCD screen doesn’t make for a family experience… flying to a vacation or to go back and see your parents in a small town or remote part of India does, and to be able to do that frequently and to afford that," offers Mohamed Ali, GE Aerospace’s top engineer.
“That’s what this industry is enabling," Ali tells Forbes India during a recent visit to Bengaluru.
Ali, the company’s VP of engineering, is sometimes described in western media as the person responsible for over 30,000 aircraft engines. Raised by a single mother in Egypt, he then went to Cornell University, and after a PhD joined GE. He worked in multiple divisions, including oil and gas, before his current position.
Alok Nanda, CEO of GE’s India Technology Center in Bengaluru, and CTO of GE South Asia Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India
GE Aerospace’s 1,200 engineers in India, many of whom are at its India Technology Center in Bengaluru, already “own" the design and development of the engines that go on the widebodies, Nanda says.
The engines go on some of the best-known widebodies from its ‘airframer’ partners, the duopoly of Boeing in the US and Airbus in Europe, such as Boeing 777, which uses the GE90 series engines, and the Airbus A330, which uses the GE CF6 family of engines.
From an engineering technology perspective, GE Aerospace came to India in 1999, starting off as an engineering analysis centre of excellence in a joint venture with Tata Consultancy Services. Very soon GE realised that the engineers and scientists at the centre would generate strong intellectual property.
Therefore in 2003, GE acquired the whole stake and the team moved to the India Technology Centre, or the John F Welch Technology Centre, which was started in 2000. GE has invested some $200 million in that centre, and the multidisciplinary team there has generated more than 4,000 patents for GE, according to the company.
First Published: Jun 09, 2023, 13:20
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