Pratt & Whitney adds fuel to manufacturing renaissance happening in Western North Carolina

March 3rd, 2023

Happy Saturday morning. Thanks for joining us.

Our days are filled with fleeting thoughts. Sometimes, the more organized among us will jot down an important one in a notebook for later recollection and review, but it’s a safe bet most float away.

In recent months we’ve offered you answers to, “I wonder what’s happening with…” Vinfast and Boom Supersonic and Wolfspeed.

Today we’re tackling Pratt & Whitney.

And if you haven’t had any of those fleeting thoughts, well, that’s okay, you can listen in, too.

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Pratt & Whitney was born in the post-World War I boom years.

The war showed the world the potential for air superiority to dominate future conflicts, and the industry evolved rapidly. Private and government actors raced to develop the latest technology in the greatest period of transportation advancement in the history of mankind. In early 1903, no human being had ever taken flight; less than 50 years later, humans were careening through the sky faster than the speed of sound.

In 1926, the U.S. Navy ordered its first 200 engines from Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company, developed by Frederick Rentschler using a $250,000 loan.

Nearly a century later, the company sits alongside Rolls-Royce and General Electric as the world’s dominant aero-engine manufacturers. Pratt & Whitney engines propel about 25% of the world’s commercial air traffic, as well as military air fleets in 22 countries, including the F-14, F-22, and F-35 fighter jets.

In April 2020, Pratt & Whitney became a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies Corporation. Six months later, the company announced plans for a $650 million manufacturing facility in Asheville, North Carolina. Under the terms of the incentives package agreed to by the company, it will create at last 800 jobs averaging $68,000 per year.

Construction of the 1,000,000-square-foot automated manufacturing facility largely concluded in November 2022, just 25 months after the project’s announcement.

The complex “will house an advanced casting foundry and conduct machining, coating and finishing of airfoils onsite,” the company said.

There are about 4,000 airfoils in a single jet engine. As Pratt & Whitney explains, “turbine airfoils are an integral piece of the engine. Like a pinwheel, they spin the shaft that drives the fan and pushes the engine forward. They are small airplane wing shaped components that extract propulsive energy from the gas stream within the engine.”

Production at the Asheville facility will support the company’s F135 engine, which powers the F-35 Lightning II – a stealth multirole combat aircraft that is a foundational component of U.S. and NATO air dominance. The Pentagon expects to spend $1.5 trillion developing, building, operating, and maintaining the F-35 fleet through 2070.

Pratt & Whitney expects production at the Asheville facility to begin in the second quarter of 2023 – that is, any week now.

The company did run into a speedbump last year – not in its manufacturing timeline, but in its economic incentives commitments. Pratt & Whitney was supposed to employ at least 250 people by the end of 2022, but it fell short by about half, pointing to labor supply issues.

Labor supply is a problem for every major employer in the country, so it should come as no surprise that larger market forces also impacted Pratt & Whitney. The incentives package includes a provision permitting the company to “catch up” on missed benchmarks, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported.

“From our perspective, that’s what we want,” Buncombe County’s Economic Development and Governmental Relations Director Tim Love told the paper. “We want them to create jobs, we want them to invest, and so we want them to catch up.”

The Asheville project adds fuel to what has become something of a manufacturing renaissance in western North Carolina.

Between 2000 and 2014, the number of Buncombe County residents working in the manufacturing sector fell from 16,450 to 11,100. But by 2021, it had rebounded to more than 14,000.

Local officials are using the Pratt & Whitney project to lure other manufacturers to the area.

“Pratt & Whitney’s decision to locate in our region is one of the best arguments we can make to other firms that they can expand and/or locate here,” Nathan Ramsey, director of the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board, told the Asheville Citizen-Times. “Pratt & Whitney is investing over half a billion dollars in our region, and that commitment demonstrates larger projects can locate here.”

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With airfoil production set to begin imminently at Pratt & Whitney’s 1,000,000-square-foot Asheville facility, the region is indeed primed for a manufacturing resurgence.

Minor labor supply issues aside, the employer is yet another feather in the cap for North Carolina officials who have been enormously successful in putting the state’s economic development environment into overdrive.