Nick Kray is no Picasso, yet his work is on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A decade ago, MoMA’s design collection picked up a composite fan blade from the GE90 jet engine that Kray helped create. The blade’s onyx black sinuous curves are pleasing to look at, but for Kray they are no longer state of the art. “We are now working on the fourth generation of that technology,” Kray says.
The Dubai-based airline Emirates alone has 131 GE90-powered 777s in service and their engines just completed 1 million cycles, or trips – each cycle includes one takeoff and one landing. That number is now set to grow faster since Emirates has 44 more 777s with the same engine on order.