In a 100-year-old hangar at Rolls-Royce’s factory in Derby, aircraft engines lie on their noses as technicians strip them down after a couple of years circling the world.
Cranes lift and flip the engines, before engineers separate different modules to be cleaned, treated in acid baths if necessary, repaired or replaced. The acrid smell of kerosene signals the part of the factory where engineers handle the metre-diameter core of the engine, in which fuel and air combine at high pressure to drive the turbines and propel 200-tonne planes through the air.
The operation is a crucial part of the effort to keep the global aircraft fleet in the air, but for Rolls-Royce visits to the overhaul shop became all too frequent in recent years amid persistent durability problems with its Trent engines, including cracking in turbine blades. That led to disputes with airline customers and weighed on the share price of one of Britain’s best known manufacturers.
Rolls’s chief executive, Tufan Erginbilgiç, described the company as a “burning platform” when he arrived in 2023. Yet any problems appear to have been extinguished: underlying profits for 2025 soared by 40% to £3.5bn, and its share price is above £13 – 10 times what it was three years ago.
The global aviation industry is gathering this coming week in Farnborough, 30 miles west of London, for a biannual airshow (alternating with another in Paris) that serves as a chance for executives to take stock. Engine manufacturers have little cause for complaint. They are still enjoying the gradual recovery of flying after the Covid pandemic, and increased orders from the boom in defence spending started by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In one of its last big moves, Keir Starmer’s government published a plan to spend more on weaponry after more than a year of wrangling.
Rolls-Royce has benefited further from huge demand for generators for AI datacentres, and shareholders are also excited by its plans to re-enter the enormous market for narrowbody jet engines. But before that Rolls-Royce needed to fix the problems in its main business.
When Erginbilgiç took over, dealing with the Trent troubles and rolling solutions out to airline customers was one of several priorities. Erginbilgiç apportioned £1bn to improving Trent durability and expanding capacity for engine maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO).
Rolls-Royce’s Trent engines – named after the river that flows to the south of Derby in England’s East Midlands – are used on bigger, twin-aisle planes, also known as widebodies: Airbus’s A330, A350 and A380, and Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and 777. Each one of the 68 blades inside the engine – about 10cm long – endures the force of a doubledecker bus on its end while generating the same power as a Formula One car. All that happens at nearly 1,800C, well above the melting point of steel and enough to turn sand in the air into shards of glass.
The blades to withstand such a hellish environment have to be made from a single crystal of superalloys of nickel and aluminium, which get stronger as temperatures increase. But even with those properties, the blades eventually wear down, with the surface turning from a dull grey to white, and signs of wear along the edges of the blades exposed in the Derby factory.
Stopping the cracking included changes to the pattern of tiny holes in the blades to increase air flow – helping to increase the cooling for the blades by 40% – and trimming some weight off the top of the blades to reduce the forces they must endure.
The changes would allow the company to triple the engine’s time on aircraft wings, rather than being dismantled in hangars, said Rachel Walker, the Trent 1000 engine programme director, speaking to reporters at the Derby factory. Just short of half of the Trent 1000 engines have received the new blades, putting the company on track to replace all of them by next June.
Airline customers might be entitled to wonder why those changes were not made before. Celine Bouas, Rolls-Royce’s senior vice-president for customers, said the upgrades were held back because of delays to certification prompted by the crisis at Boeing over two deadly crashes of its 737 Max. Although Rolls-Royce does not make engines for the Max, the US Federal Aviation Administration faced accusations of being too close to Boeing, so all certification work slowed to allow for increased scrutiny.
Rolls-Royce has a tricky balance to strike. Its financial success is plain to see, but airlines have been asking why the engine-maker should not be sharing more of those profits with them, given how long they suffered from the reliability problems.
“We needed the fix, we needed the MRO set-up so that all customers could start feeling the difference,” said Bouas. “Have we caused pain to our customers? Yes, it caused pain. It has also cost us a great deal. I mean, in terms of cost, loss of revenue, investment in the product and the MRO. So it was necessary for Rolls-Royce and for our customers to invest.”
The work is helping to persuade new customers to choose Rolls-Royce engines on their planes, with a 1% improvement in fuel consumption translating to cost reductions of $500,000 (£372,000) a year. Bouas said the company was very close to a deal with an airline which has “for decades” only used engines from US rival GE and its CFM joint venture with France’s Safran.
Rob Watson, Rolls-Royce’s president for civil aerospace, said: “I think we have delivered our commitments in many areas, and in some areas we’ve outperformed what we said two years ago.”
Along with fixing the Trent programme, another of Erginbilgiç’s priorities when he took over was cutting investments in distractions from its main business. For instance, out went an electric propulsion arm, in a blow to hopes it could contribute to decarbonising aviation. (Some of the electrical lessons could be applied to hybrid systems that add electric propulsion to gas turbine jet engines, although it was likely only when a new plane was announced, Watson said.) However, the company continued to spend heavily on its next-generation engine technology, UltraFan.
Rolls-Royce executives from Erginbilgiç down insist that the company does not need a return to the narrowbody market to continue to grow. But nobody can deny the size of the attraction. Rolls-Royce left the market for the jet engines used on medium-sized, narrowbody jets in 2011 with the sale of its stake in a joint venture, but most of the growth since then has been in that market as airlines concentrate on point-to-point journeys.
Two UltraFan engines are being developed: a widebody version with 80,000 pounds of thrust, and a 30,000-lb narrowbody version. The 30 is still in a concept stage, with an aim of building and testing by 2028. The 80 is the first priority, with Rolls-Royce last month successfully linking the engine’s power gearbox to the high-pressure core.
Rolls-Royce is pushing for UK government support for the investments – despite having cash for billions in shareholder payouts – although it is braced for a small delay while a new government, under Andy Burnham, reviews options. Both engines are being designed with new, as yet unannounced aircraft in mind, suggesting that Rolls-Royce will probably not try to fit the UltraFan under the wing of existing planes.
“The reality now on the large engine is going to be driven by the next widebody platform,” said Watson. “That step change in technology, step change in performance, probably warrants a new aircraft.”
Erginbilgiç has made clear that Rolls-Royce would like to share the massive investment needed in returning to the narrowbody market. Watson said the company could “do that alone, OK, but we’d rather de-risk it. We’d rather do the partnership and make sure we’re offering the very best technology and the best commercial structure to the market.”
