Senior VP and Chief Technology & Operations Officer, Ge Aerospace
Search every verified Mohamed Ali interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Mohamed Ali, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology & Operations Officer at GE Aerospace, has been discussing the company's progress on engine durability and next-generation propulsion technology. During GE Aerospace's March 2024 Investor Day, Ali stated that the company had introduced fixes for parts limiting LEAP engine durability in hot and harsh environments, including the shroud, radial drive shaft, fuel nozzle cooling, and high-pressure turbine blade. He said the first production engine with the fuel nozzle cooling fix was at Airbus and that the first production set for the turbine blade fix was ready, with production engines expected to reach mature time on wing for LEAP 1A by the end of 2024 and LEAP 1B in 2025. Ali attributed his confidence to real testing that simulated actual failure modes and dust environments, describing the process as "turn on and turn off" of the problem. Ali has also spoken about the CFM RISE program and open fan architecture, which he described as necessary to achieve more than 20% fuel burn improvement due to physical limitations of ducted engines. He noted that the company had tested a megawatt-class hybrid electric system at 45,000 feet with NASA and was collaborating with Boeing and Airbus on hybrid electric and hydrogen demonstrations. Ali emphasized the company's safety culture, stating that "bringing them home safely is the number one responsibility" and that the engineering team aims to "find safety issues and fix them before they find us." He also discussed the application of Flight Deck, GE Aerospace's lean operating model, to improve supplier output, noting that ten critical supplier sites more than doubled their output in the second quarter of 2024.
“Bringing them home safely is what earns us the right to lift people up which in turn earns us the right to inventing the future of flight. We find problems before problems find us because when they find us they are painful and expensive.”
“We will return 70 to 75% of our available free cash flow to investors by way of dividends and buybacks, leaving 20 to 25% for inorganic investments in the business. We do not intend to be all things to all people but will fortify our existing positions with strong strategic, operational, and financial framing.”
“Flight Deck is our proprietary lean operating model. It is how we run the business with customers' expectations front and center, accelerating our lean transformation to deliver sustainable results in safety, quality, delivery, and cost.”
“We are confident that the GE9X program, given all the actions and benefits of volume, will be profitable by the early 2030s.”
“We expect production engines at the end of this year to be at the mature time on wing for LEAP 1A, with 1B following in 2025. This confidence is based on real testing, not theory or wishful thinking.”
“We do not compete on safety; we happily share that knowledge with everybody in the industry because it is our responsibility to lead the industry in continuous improvement.”
“The open fan engine technology achieves more than 20% fuel burn improvement, which is practically impossible with a ducted engine due to physics and drag limitations. This technology offers less risk, higher durability, and higher reliability.”
“We will see mid to high teens growth in revenues and 20 to 25% increase in deliveries on the LEAP engine in 2024, with profits increasing to a range of 6 to 6.3 billion dollars despite investments in GE9X and RISE technologies.”
“Our safety culture is built on four tenets: problem solving at the point of impact, transparency, proactivity in finding problems before they find us, and demanding zero defects while never assuming perfection.”
“We are investing $2 billion in R&D this year to advance scientific and engineering disciplines including aerodynamics, material sciences, and advanced computational modeling to invent the future of flight.”
“We will spend $5 billion in the next five years across the global footprint to lay in the capacity we need with the aero body space and the wide body space and, frankly, the military. We are seeing an uptick in the engine platforms. We need the footprint and capacity to support those engines for decades to come.”
“This team has done a phenomenal job implementing Flight Deck and putting the principles to work and enhance quality and safety and driving better efficiency and better use of all of the folks we have here to improve our delivery turnaround times for customers.”
“Our challenge today is not demand. It really is supply. Over three quarters of our challenges today are rooted in the supply base. We are not getting enough material in to do our work. We are taking Flight Deck to the supply base.”
“In the second quarter, we saw ten of those supplier sites more than double their output to us. We see Flight Deck helping us with our suppliers going in and identifying and breaking those constraints.”
“We have the airlines flying at record levels and the airframers are looking to ramp production. We have a supply challenge, not a demand issue in any way, shape or form. We will work out of the current situation, but it will take a while because we're pursuing a moving target. That's a good thing.”
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