Pratt & Whitney Unveils Valox Engine to Power the Air Force’s Next Drone Fighters

Pratt & Whitney is entering the race to power the Air Force’s future robotic fighter jets, unveiling its Valox engine family at Farnborough as the Pentagon pushes to field thousands of uncrewed aircraft.

Pratt & Whitney, an RTX business, unveiled a new engine family called Valox this week at the Farnborough International Airshow to power a new generation of uncrewed fighter jets for the Air Force.

The reveal marks Pratt & Whitney’s formal entry into a fast-growing market for small jet engines built for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, a fleet of semi-autonomous jets designed to fly alongside crewed fighters. The Air Force said June 17 it had awarded CCA Increment 1 contracts to General Atomics and Anduril and is working toward fielding roughly 1,000 combat-capable CCA over time, part of an effort to add mass and flexibility to its fighter force.

FlightGlobal reported that the revealed Valox family targets 800 to 1,500 pounds of thrust. Pratt & Whitney’s official Valox product page describes a broader, scalable family spanning 500 to 1,800 pounds of thrust. RTX says the engines are designed to power effectors, autonomous collaborative platforms, and other emerging applications.

“The Pratt & Whitney Valox engine will really be purpose-built for the different missions, for high-performance propulsion, at the speed and the scale that our customers are asking for,” Jill Albertelli, president of Pratt & Whitney’s Military Engines business, told FlightGlobal at Farnborough. “We’re making great progress on this engine family,” she said. “Demand is significant, and we want to be there for our customers any way we can.”

Pratt & Whitney’s GATORWORKS team received $10 million in funding to mature the design that became the Valox 1500, Albertelli said. RTX announced in September 2025 that GATORWORKS was developing a scalable engine family for munitions and CCA, spanning 500 to 1,800 pounds of thrust, and said the effort prioritized development speed and affordability.

“This new family of engines is being developed by our GATORWORKS team, which prioritized development speed and affordability,” Albertelli said in a Sept. 22, 2025, RTX news release. “The scalability of the architecture, the commonality across models, and the use of additive manufacturing will allow us to significantly reduce development and production timelines as we look at existing and future applications with customers.”

Separately, RTX said Sept. 24, 2025, that Pratt & Whitney had completed critical testing on a small turbofan engine family for CCA and that its current production engines could offer up to 20% increased qualified thrust for unmanned applications. “For unmanned applications, our commercial-off-the-shelf engines can offer an up to 20% increase in their qualified thrust capability,” Albertelli said. “This means that we can deliver increased performance from these production engines. Ultimately, this will allow for reduced cost and weight for multiple applications.”

RTX said July 20 that Pratt & Whitney had completed demonstration testing of an additively manufactured TJ150 engine, with nearly 60% of the engine produced by volume through additive manufacturing. The company said it consolidated more than 50 individual hot-section components into a handful of 3D-printed parts and successfully tested a 3D-printed rotating turbine wheel for the TJ150 configuration. RTX said lessons from that work are being applied to other programs, including Valox.

“For expendable engines like the TJ150, where missions can last minutes or hours, simplifying the design and scaling production quickly is essential to meeting rising demand,” Albertelli said. “Additive manufacturing helps us move designs from concept to capability faster, and we are leveraging what we learned on the TJ150 to benefit other programs, including the Pratt & Whitney Valox engine family.”

Pratt & Whitney is also supplying a PW500-family engine, with more than 24.5 million flight hours of service experience, for Northrop Grumman’s YFQ-48A Talon Blue CCA demonstrator. RTX said April 17 that the engine had been integrated and was ready to power flight tests.

“Leveraging commercial technology allowed us to innovate faster, while balancing cost and critical performance enhancements for the CCA mission,” said Peter Sommerkorn, vice president of Military Development Programs at Pratt & Whitney. “The Pratt & Whitney team took a production engine, with more than 24.5 million flight hours, self-invested in key validation and capability improvement, and integrated it into Talon Blue.”

The Air Force has cast CCA as central to its future force structure. Announcing the Increment 1 contracts June 17, the service said the awards to General Atomics and Anduril, along with six mission-autonomy contracts under a six-year baseline vehicle, came four months ahead of schedule and that the systems were ready for full-scale manufacturing, said Col. Timothy Helfrich, the Air Force’s portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft. The Air Force said it aims to procure more than 150 combat-capable CCA by the end of the decade and roughly 1,000 over time, and expects to select a primary mission-autonomy provider by summer 2027.

Helfrich also said an April crash of a General Atomics YFQ-42A shortly after takeoff during a test flight in California was not a factor in the decision to award contracts to both companies. The crash grounded YFQ-42A test flights for about six weeks before they resumed in May with a software fix.

“Collaborative Combat Aircraft change how we project power and generate mass in highly contested environments,” Gen. Ken Wilsbach, the Air Force chief of staff, said in the June 17 release. “Delivering this capability to our warfighters faster ensures our forces maintain the tactical edge required to deter and, if necessary, defeat any adversary.”

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the contracts “reaffirm the service’s confidence that it can buy more than 150 combat-capable CCA by the end of the decade, well below the program’s long-term goal of roughly 1,000.”

The Air Force designated General Atomics’ YFQ-42A and Anduril’s YFQ-44A as its first CCA prototypes in March 2025, calling them the first in a new generation of uncrewed fighter aircraft. Then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in 2023 that the service envisioned about 1,000 CCA to provide what he called affordable mass alongside crewed fighters.

Pratt & Whitney enters a crowded field. Honeywell Aerospace said Feb. 23 that the Air Force had awarded it a prototype contract based on its SkyShot 1600 engine, which the company says spans 800 to 2,800 pounds of thrust and can be configured as a turbojet or turbofan.

“We’ve combined decades of proven technologies with the latest advancements to create an engine that can keep pace with cost, speed and performance demands of next-generation platforms,” said Dave Marinick, president of Engines and Power Systems at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies. “We look forward to supporting the U.S. Air Force in the next phase of collaborative combat aircraft and unmanned aircraft systems propulsion efforts.”

GE Aerospace and Kratos announced the same day a $12.4 million Air Force contract to complete preliminary design of the GEK1500, which the companies describe as a 1,500-pound-thrust engine intended for reusable uncrewed combat aircraft.

“Building on the success of our GEK800 engine program, the development of the GEK1500 further demonstrates our team’s ability and commitment to deliver high-performance, affordable, jet engines that can be rapidly produced to meet the demands of our defense customers,” said Stacey Rock, president of Kratos’ Turbine Technologies Division.

Breaking Defense reported Feb. 25 that the Air Force also awarded contracts to Beehive Industries, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney and the GE Aerospace-Kratos team to mature engine designs for a second CCA increment and other autonomous platforms. The outlet reported June 3 that the Air Force separately selected GE Aerospace and Rolls-Royce to advance medium-thrust engine designs — a larger class than Valox, SkyShot 1600 or the GEK1500. Rolls-Royce, which says its AE engine family has logged more than 90 million flight hours, is pitching that engine alongside its Orpheus design for CCA propulsion.

“Autonomous aircraft represent a fundamental shift in how the U.S. Air Force will project combat airpower,” said Candice Bineyard, Rolls-Royce’s director of business development and future programs for defense. “By leveraging our advanced AE engine family, we can move quickly to deliver the performance, electrical power, and reliability our warfighters need for operational advantage in contested environments.”

Pratt & Whitney’s Valox product page says the engine family is designed around development cycles measured in months rather than years, digital engineering from the outset and additive manufacturing intended to speed development and add production flexibility. RTX, based in Arlington, Virginia, reported more than $88 billion in 2025 sales and more than 180,000 employees worldwide. Pratt & Whitney supports more than 90,000 in-service engines through its global maintenance network.