We Compared Boeing and Airbus Engines. What We Found Will Shock You

Name: We Compared Boeing and Airbus Engines. What We Found Will Shock You
Uploaded: 2026-08-31T15:51:12.091Z
Duration: 54 min 55 s
Channel: The Engine Explorer

The Engine Explorer

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25 Video Views·Aug 31, 2026 #machine #engine #boeing

Comparing the Size of Boeing and Airbus Engines

Stand at the base of a GE9X engine mounted beneath the wing of a Boeing 777X, and the experience defies every expectation you have ever had about what a machine can be — the fan diameter alone stretches to 134 inches, roughly the same width as a Boeing 737 fuselage, spinning with a precision and controlled fury that turns raw physics into something that feels almost supernatural. Now walk across the hangar to where a Rolls-Royce Trent XWB hangs beneath an Airbus A350, its 118-inch fan drawing in nearly a ton of air every second, its titanium blades shaped not by intuition but by computational fluid dynamics running millions of simulations before a single piece of metal was ever cut. The rivalry between Boeing and Airbus has defined commercial aviation for decades, but nowhere is that competition more visceral, more immediate, more genuinely jaw-dropping than when you stand between their engines and realize you are looking at two fundamentally different philosophies made physical — two approaches to the same impossible problem of moving hundreds of people across continents at altitudes that would kill an unprotected human in minutes. Boeing's partnership with GE has produced engines of almost cartoonish scale — the GE90-115B, which powers the 777-300ER, held the record as the world's largest and most powerful commercial jet engine for years, producing over 115,000 pounds of thrust from a fan blade assembly so large that a single blade, removed from the engine, weighs more than most motorcycles on the road today. Airbus, meanwhile, has favored a multi-partner consortium approach, with engines from Rolls-Royce, CFM International, and Engine Alliance powering its wide-body and narrow-body families, each bringing their own dimensional philosophies to the table. The Trent 900, designed for the A380 — Airbus's extraordinary double-deck behemoth — produces thrust across four separate installations, and when all four spool up to full takeoff power simultaneously, the combined acoustic energy registers on seismometers. But raw size is only part of the story, because modern turbofan engineering is a study in beautiful contradiction: engines are getting physically larger while simultaneously burning less fuel per pound of thrust, their bypass ratios increasing to the point where the cold airstream flowing around the core contributes more propulsive force than the burning jet core itself. Boeing's CFM LEAP-1B, selected exclusively for the 737 MAX, underwent an extraordinary engineering redesign — its fan diameter is constrained by the aircraft's low-wing ground clearance, a legacy of the 737's origins in the 1960s, a compromise that forced engineers to extract maximum performance from a physically restricted envelope using advanced blade geometries and composite materials that did not exist when the original airframe was drawn. The Airbus A320neo family, equipped with either the LEAP-1A or the Pratt & Whitney PW1100G geared turbofan, enjoys slightly more ground clearance freedom, enabling different installation geometries that give both engines room to breathe. When you place these powerplants side by side — not as abstract specifications on a datasheet but as real, enormous objects in physical space — what strikes you is not just their sheer scale but the texture of their complexity, the layered architecture of exotic alloys and ceramic matrix composites operating simultaneously at temperatures exceeding the melting point of the metals surrounding them, cooled by airflow paths engineered to a tolerance that would seem physically impossible to maintain at 35,000 feet traveling at 85% the speed of sound. These engines are the furthest edge of what human engineering has ever produced, and in their decades-long competition, Boeing and Airbus have driven each other to build machines that transform every ordinary transatlantic crossing into a quiet, unremarkable miracle performed at altitude.

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#machine #engine #boeing #airbus

Quick question before you scroll away. When you look at a Boeing and an Airbus parked side-by-side at the gate, what's the very first thing your eyes lock onto? Not the tail. Not the winglets. Not the paint job. It's the engines. Those massive cylinders hanging under the wing, swallowing air like they're trying to inhale the entire runway in one breath. And here's the thing almost nobody realizes. The fight between Boeing and Airbus isn't really decided in the cockpit. It's not decided in the cabin or even in the boardroom. It's decided right there in the size of those engines. Because in modern aviation, the engine isn't just a part of the plane. The engine basically is the plane. So today we're putting them head-to-head. The engines on Boeing's jets versus the engines on Airbus's jets. Round by round. From the little narrowbodies you take on weekend trips all the way up to the ocean-crossing giants. And by the end of this video, I'm going to show you a single turbofan that's so enormous. Its fan is wider than the entire body of a smaller jetliner. No exaggeration. No clickbait. It's real and the number is going to mess with your head. So stick around till the end because that's where the most absurd engine ever built is waiting. Let's get into it. Before we line them up though, let me give you a way to actually see these things because numbers on a screen are easy to glaze over. Next time you're at an airport, do this. Walk up to a window near the gate and just look at the engine on whatever plane is parked there. Notice how it's not a small thing tucked under the wing. On the big jets, that engine is taller than a person standing next to it. The opening at the front, the intake, is so wide that a grown adult could stand inside it without ducking. Ground crews literally walk into these things to inspect them. That's the scale we're playing with today. These aren't accessories bolted onto an airplane. On the biggest jets, the two engines together can account for a huge chunk of the plane's value and almost all of its engineering complexity. The airframe is, in a sense, just a very expensive way to carry two engines across the sky. But first, I have to clear up one thing because it trips up an enormous number of people. And if I don't say it now, half the comments are going to be about it. Neither Boeing nor Airbus actually builds their own engines. Yeah, let that sink in for a second. The two biggest names in the entire sky don't make the things that actually push their planes forward. Those come from a small handful of specialist companies. General Electric, which these days goes by GE Aerospace. Rolls-Royce, the British legends. Pratt & Whitney, the American veterans. And then a couple of joint ventures, like CFM International and Engine Alliance, which are basically those big companies teaming up to share the load and the risk. So what Boeing and Airbus actually do is design the airframe, the wings, the fuselage, the systems, the shape of the whole thing. Then they go shopping for engines. Sometimes they offer airlines a choice of two or three different engines for the same plane. Sometimes there's only one option. So when we say Boeing's engines versus Airbus's engines, what we really mean is the engines that get bolted onto Boeing jets versus the ones that get bolted onto Airbus jets. And that distinction actually matters a lot because here's where it gets weird. Sometimes the exact same engine family ends up hanging under the wing of both a Boeing and an Airbus. We'll get to that. It's wilder than it sounds. Okay, with that out of the way, let's start at the bottom of the food chain and climb our way up to the monsters. Round one, the narrowbodies, the short and medium haul workhorses. These are the planes you've almost certainly flown on probably dozens of times without even thinking about it. The single aisle jets that haul you from one city to the next. On the Boeing side, you've got the 737 MAX. On the Airbus side, the A320 NEO family. And these two airplanes are locked in what is genuinely the most intense rivalry in all of commercial aviation. They've each sold thousands upon thousands of units. Airlines have placed orders worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Entire fleets, entire business models are built around choosing one of these two. And the engines tell a fascinating story about how that rivalry actually plays out. The 737 MAX is powered exclusively by one engine. There's no choice, no menu. It's the CFM-LEAP-1B built by CFM International. And that little B at the end of the name is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting because it points straight at a problem Boeing has been wrestling with for literally decades. Here's the issue. The 737 at its very core is an old design. The original 737 rolled out in the 1960s. We're talking about an airframe whose DNA goes back more than half a century. And back then, jet engines were skinny little tubes. They didn't need much room. So the plane was designed to sit low to the ground with short landing gear, which was actually great at the time. It made it easy to load bags, easy to service, perfect for smaller airports. But fast forward to today, and that low stance has become a genuine headache because modern engines want to be fat. They want big, wide fans that move a huge amount of air. That's the whole secret to modern efficiency. The bigger the fan, the more air you can move slowly and gently. And moving air slowly and gently is far more fuel efficient than blasting a small amount of air out at high speed. But a fat engine on a plane that sits low to the ground, that engine is going to scrape the tarmac. You physically can't fit it under there. So the engineers at CFM and Boeing had to perform a small miracle. The LEAP-1B that hangs under the 737 MAX has a fan diameter of about 69 inches, roughly 69.4 inches to be precise. And to make even that fit, they had to get genuinely creative. They moved the engine forward and up, mounted it higher relative to the wing, and gave the bottom of the nacelle, the engine's outer casing, a slightly flattened shape. If you've ever looked closely at a 737 MAX engine and thought it looked a little squished at the bottom, a little egg-shaped instead of perfectly round, that's exactly why. People in the industry actually nicknamed it the hamster pouch look. It's not a styling choice. It's the engineers fighting for every last inch of ground clearance. Now let's walk across the aisle and look at the Airbus A320neo. And here's where Airbus had a quiet but massive advantage. The A320 is a newer design than the 737. It was designed from the start to sit higher off the ground with taller landing gear, which means Airbus can bolt on bigger engines without breaking a sweat. No squishing, no hamster pouch, no desperate fight for clearance. And on top of that, Airbus offers airlines a choice. The A320neo family can be ordered with either the CFM LEAP-1A or the Pratt & Whitney PW1100G, two completely different engines from two different manufacturers on the same airplane. Airlines pick whichever one fits their needs and their maintenance philosophy better. Here's where it gets really interesting and where the size difference starts to show. The LEAP-1A on the A320neo has a fan diameter of 78 inches and the Pratt & Whitney PW1100G is even bigger, coming in at a whopping 81 inches. Now do the quick math on that. The Airbus narrowbody is carrying engines with fans up to 12 inches wider than its direct Boeing rival. That's a full foot of extra diameter on a plane that's roughly the same overall size, carries roughly the same number of passengers and flies roughly the same routes. To put that 78-inch LEAP-1A fan in perspective, it's actually comparable in size to the engines that used to hang on a Boeing 757, which is a substantially bigger airplane. And bigger fan diameter usually translates directly into something called a higher bypass ratio. I'll explain exactly what that means in a moment because it's the single most important concept in this whole video. But for now, just know that the LEAP-1A comes with a bypass ratio of around 11 to one, while the LEAP-1B on the Boeing sits at roughly 8.6 to one. Higher bypass, generally speaking, means better fuel efficiency and less noise. Here's another little detail that I think is genuinely cool. Both of these LEAP engines use fan blades made of woven carbon fiber composite, the very technology that, as you'll see later, was first pioneered on a much bigger engine. The LEAP-1B on the 737 MAX, for instance, uses 18 of these woven carbon fiber blades. And compared to the old CFM56 it replaced, the LEAP runs at a much higher overall pressure ratio, squeezing the air far harder before burning it, around 41 to one versus roughly 28 to one on the old engine. The result is an engine that's about 15% more fuel efficient than the CFM56 it replaced. That 15% might not sound dramatic, but for an airline burning millions of gallons of fuel a year across a huge fleet, that's the difference between profit and loss. Entire airline business plans live and die on a number like that. So in this very first round, on pure engine size, the Airbus narrowbody is swinging a noticeably bigger hammer. But, and this is important, it's not because Airbus engineers are smarter or because Boeing engineers are lazy. It's because Boeing was shackled to a 60-year-old fuselage that sits too close to the ground. They were fighting with one hand tied behind their back from the very start. Honestly, the fact that they made a 69-inch fan work at all on that old airframe is a pretty impressive piece of engineering jujitsu. If you're enjoying this breakdown so far, do me a quick favor and smash that like button and hit subscribe if you want more aviation deep dives like this one. It genuinely helps the channel more than you'd think and it's completely free. All right, let's pause the comparison for one second because I promised I'd explain the magic and now's the time. What actually is a turbofan engine and why does size matter so much? Because once you understand this, every single number in this video is going to hit completely differently. Okay, so picture the engine. Air comes in the front and it goes out the back and that's what pushes the plane forward. Simple. But the clever part is how that happens. At the very front of the engine is the fan. That's the big spinning set of blades you can see when you look into the front of an engine. That fan is the star of the show. When that fan spins, it grabs a massive amount of air and shoves it backward. But here's the trick. The air splits into two paths. A small portion of that air goes into the core of the engine. That's the hot fiery heart of the machine. In the core, the air gets squeezed by compressors until it's under enormous pressure. Then fuel gets sprayed in and ignited and it burns, creating a blast of hot gas that rushes out the back and crucially spins a turbine that keeps the whole thing running and keeps that big fan turning. But the other portion of air, and this is the genius part, doesn't go through the fiery core at all. It just bypasses the core entirely, flowing around the outside of it and shoots straight out the back. That's where the term bypass ratio comes from. It's the ratio of air that goes around the core compared to the air that goes through it. A bypass ratio of 11 to 1 means 11 times as much air as going around the core as through it. And here's why that matters so much. It turns out that pushing a huge column of air backward gently is far, far more efficient than pushing a small column of air backward violently. Think of it like a canoe. You can paddle with a tiny paddle and thrash the water like crazy, or you can use a great big paddle and move slowly and smoothly. The big paddle gets you there using way less energy. A big fan is the big paddle. It moves a giant, slow, gentle column of air and that's where modern fuel efficiency comes from. Or here's another way to picture it. Imagine you want to push a stalled car. You could run at it full speed and slam into it with all your might, which is violent, exhausting, and honestly kind of ineffective. Or you could place both hands flat against it and push steadily and firmly. The steady push moves the car better while wearing you out far less. That's exactly the difference between an old skinny engine screaming hot exhaust out the back and a modern wide fan engine gently shoving a vast wall of air. Same goal, completely different efficiency. The old jets were the running tackle. The new ones are the calm, firm push. And the bigger the fan, the firmer and gentler that push becomes. That's the whole reason engines have been getting bigger and bigger over the decades. Not because bigger looks cooler, though it absolutely does. It's because a bigger fan moving more bypass air is the single most effective way to burn less fuel and make less noise. So every time you hear a fan diameter number in this video, what you're really hearing is a measure of how cleverly that engine sips fuel. Bigger fan generally means a smarter, quieter, thriftier engine. Hold on to that because it's about to explain something that seems completely backwards. All right, round two, the wide bodies. And this, my friends, is where things get genuinely serious. These are the long haul giants. The planes that cross oceans, that fly 14, 15, 16 hours nonstop. And the engines on these things are absolute monsters. On the Airbus side, the star of the show is the A350. It's a gorgeous, modern, carbon fiber twin jet that airlines absolutely adore. And like the 737 MAX, it's powered exclusively by one engine family. No choice here. It's the Rolls-Royce Trent XWB. And this is the largest turbo fan Rolls-Royce has ever built, with a fan diameter of 118 inches. 118 inches. So notice what just happened. We've leaped from the 70 and 80 inch range of the narrow bodies all the way up to nearly 10 feet across. That's the jump from single aisle to wide body. And you can see it instantly in the engine size. The Trent XWB comes in two main flavors. The Trent XWB-84 produces 84,200 pounds of thrust and powers the smaller A350-900. And then there's the more powerful version, the Trent XWB-97, which puts out 97,000 pounds of thrust to haul the bigger, stretched A350-1000, as well as the new A350 freighter. And Rolls-Royce is genuinely proud of this engine, for good reason. They'll happily tell you that the Trent XWB-84 has been chosen by nine out of the 10 most profitable airlines in the world. That's not nothing. That's a serious vote of confidence from the people who count every dollar. So that's a lot of grunt. And it's a brilliant, efficient engine. But Boeing is about to walk into the ring with something that makes even the mighty Trent XWB look kind of modest by comparison. Boeing's long-haul flagship is the 777. It's been around for decades, and it's a legend. But its newest, king-of-the-hill version is the 777X, which is set to enter service with Lufthansa as the launch customer. And the engine strapped to that airplane is, quite simply, the biggest commercial jet engine that humanity has ever built. Full stop. No qualifiers. It's called the GE9X. And I need you to really, genuinely picture this next number, because it's hard to wrap your head around. The GE9X has a fan diameter of 134 inches. That is 11 feet and 2 inches across. And here's the comparison that makes people's jaws drop. The fan of the GE9X is nearly as wide as the entire fuselage of a Boeing 737. Read that again, slowly. The engine on Boeing's biggest jet has a fan that's about as wide as the whole body of Boeing's smallest jet. The tube that you sit in, with the aisle and the seats and the overhead bins on a 737, you could very nearly slide that entire cabin inside the front of this one engine. That's the scale we are talking about. When this thing is sitting on the ground before installation, people walk up to it and just stare, because your brain refuses to accept that it's an engine and not a small building. In fact, the GE9X is so enormous that it created a genuine logistics headache. It's far too big to simply bolt onto most aircraft used for testing. When GE needed a flying testbed to certify it, they used a specially modified Boeing 747-400, based out at Victorville in the Mojave Desert in California. They mounted the giant GE9X onto the inner pylon of the plane's left wing in place of one of its normal engines. And here's the wild part. The engine is so heavy and so powerful that the test pilots have to actively compensate for it in flight. They pump fuel between tanks to balance out the engine's weight on one side, and they use the two normal engines on the opposite wing to counter the thrust of the giant GE9X just to keep the airplane flying straight. They're essentially flying a lopsided airplane on purpose, with a small team of 15 to 20 engineers in the back surrounded by racks of computers, all to put the world's biggest engine through its paces. The thing meant to test the future is so large it takes a jumbo jet and a cockpit full of tricks just to carry it. And here's a detail I absolutely love. The GE9X is actually six inches wider in fan diameter than the GE90, which was the engine on the older 777S. And get this. The GE90 itself held the title of biggest engine in the world for years. So the GE9X didn't just beat some random competitor. It beat the previous record holder, which happened to be its own older sibling. GE basically said, the only engine big enough to dethrone our champion is going to be another one of ours. And here's how they actually made that giant fan work without it weighing a ton. The GE9X uses just 16 fan blades made of carbon fiber composite. 16. That's actually six fewer blades than the GE90, which used 22. Think about how counterintuitive that is. They made the fan bigger, but used fewer blades. The trick is that each blade is a marvel of advanced design. Fourth generation composite technology shaped so cleverly that 16 of them move more air more efficiently than the older engines 22 ever could. Fewer, smarter, better. It's that same theme echoing again. The whole engine is a lesson in doing more with less. But now here comes the twist. And this is the part that surprises absolutely everybody. And it's where that turbo fan lesson from earlier pays off. Bigger doesn't always mean it pushes harder in everyday use. The GE9X is rated at 110,000 pounds of thrust, which is actually 5,000 pounds less than the most powerful version of the older, smaller GE90. Wait, what? The biggest engine ever built isn't even the most powerful in everyday service? It produces less thrust than the engine it replaced? How on earth does that make sense? It actually makes perfect, beautiful sense. And it's one of my favorite pieces of engineering logic in all of aviation. The Boeing 777X has a brand new, brilliantly designed wing. That wing is so aerodynamically efficient, it generates so much lift that the airplane simply doesn't need as much raw thrust to fly as the older 777 did. The wing is doing more of the work. So GE made a deliberate, clever choice. They built a fan that's absolutely enormous, not to crank out more brute power, but to produce the same power far, far more efficiently. Remember the canoe and the big paddle? That's exactly what's happening here. That gigantic, slow-spinning, 134-inch fan moves a colossal column of air gently, and it sips dramatically less fuel than a smaller fan screaming away at high speed would. The result is that the GE9X achieves around 10% greater fuel efficiency than its already impressive predecessor. The size isn't about power. The size is about thrift. It got bigger specifically so it could waste less. And don't go thinking it can't flex when it wants to. In testing, the GE9X generated a staggering 134,300 pounds of thrust, which set an official Guinness World Record for the most powerful jet engine ever. Even though, in normal service, it's deliberately certified and dialed back to 110,000 pounds. So in everyday flying, this engine is running at only about 82% of what it's truly capable of. It's a giant deliberately holding back, like a heavyweight boxer throwing gentle jabs because that's all the situation requires. The raw capability is there. It just doesn't need to show off. So round two? On sheer engine size, Boeing takes it, and it's honestly not even close. The 777X's GE9X is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the skies. The single largest commercial turbofan ever to fly. Quick question for you while we're here. Drop it in the comments. Would you rather fly long haul on the brand new Boeing 777X with that record-breaking engine or on the sleek, elegant Airbus A350? There's no wrong answer. I'm just genuinely curious which way you lean. Let me know down below. Now, round three. And this is the round almost nobody sees coming because it involves the two biggest passenger planes ever to fly. And here's the gut punch built into it. One of them isn't even being made anymore. I'm talking about the four engine giants. Boeing 747, the original and forever queen of the skies. And Airbus' A380, the colossal double-decker super jumbo. These planes are special and they change the engine story completely because they don't have two engines. They have four. And once you've got four engines spreading out the workload, each individual engine doesn't need to be quite as colossal as the ones on the big twins. The math shifts. Let's start with the A380 because it's simply the largest passenger plane in the world. And it actually offers two engine choices. It can be ordered with either the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 or the Engine Alliance GP7200. The Trent 900 has a fan diameter of 116 inches and generates up to around 84,000 pounds of thrust. And its competitor, the GP7200 is one of the most fascinating mongrel engines in all of aviation. Here's why. The Engine Alliance is a joint venture between GE and Pratt & Whitney. And the GP7200 they built is essentially a fusion of both companies' greatest hits. It's built around a scaled-down version of the GE90 core. That's the GE half. The same family that gave us those record-breaking 777 engines combined with a Pratt & Whitney fan and low-pressure system. So it's literally GE and Pratt & Whitney DNA spliced together into one engine hanging under the wing of an Airbus. If you ever needed proof that the engine world is its own strange, interconnected universe sitting on top of the Boeing vs. Airbus rivalry, the GP7200 is it. Now here's a number about the A380 that stops me cold every single time I think about it. Each engine on the A380 sucks in around 1.25 tons of air every single second while it's flying. A ton and a quarter of air per second, per engine. And there are four of them. So this airplane, at cruise, is inhaling roughly five tons of air every second. The A380 is essentially a flying vacuum cleaner operating on a scale that's almost impossible to picture. And just to give you a sense of how physically massive these wide-body engines are as objects, forget thrust for a second and think about weight. A single GE9X weighs in the neighborhood of 21,000 pounds. That's more than 10 tons for one engine. That's heavier than a fully loaded delivery truck. And the 777X carries two of them. The engines alone, before you add a single passenger or drop of fuel, weigh as much as a small house. When ground crews need to remove one for maintenance, it's not a quick job with a wrench. It's a major operation involving specialized cranes and dollies, with the engine carefully lowered away from the wing like you're performing surgery on the airplane. These things are not casually handled. And when you add up all four engines, the total output is monstrous. With each of its four engines producing over 75,000 pounds of force, the A380 can reach up to 300,000 pounds of total thrust with everything at full power. To give you a sense of that, it's roughly the combined output of nearly six Boeing 737 MAX jets, all bolted to a single airframe. It takes that much muscle just to heave the world's heaviest passenger plane off the runway and up into the sky. Now let's look at Boeing's side of this round, the 747, and specifically its final and most modern version, the 747-8. By the time Boeing built that one, the engine game had already shifted hard toward efficiency, away from the brute force approach of earlier decades. The 747-8 is powered by the G-Anx engine, which has a fan diameter of about 104.7 inches. So notice the pattern here because it's important. On these four-engine giants, the individual engines are actually smaller than the GE-9X on the twin-engine 777X, the Trent-900 at 116 inches, the G-Anx at around 105 inches. Both of them are narrower than that 134-inch monster on the 777X. And at first, that feels totally backwards. The biggest planes don't have the biggest engines, but it makes perfect sense once you remember the math. Split the workload across four engines, and each one gets to be leaner and smaller. Concentrate that same workload into just two engines, and each one has to be a giant. The number of engines completely changes the size of each one. But here's the bittersweet part of round three, and it's the real story of this category. This entire breed of airplane is fading away. The four-engine giant is a dying class. They're gradually disappearing from our skies. And the reason is exactly the efficiency story we've been talking about this whole time. Newer twin jets like the 787, the A350, and the upcoming 777X can deliver similar long-haul capacity using the fuel efficiency of just two engines instead of four. And here's the simple, brutal truth of airline economics. Two engines means two engines to buy, two to maintain, two to fuel, two to insure. Four engines means double of all of that. When two big, modern, efficient engines can do the job that used to require four, the four-engine giants can't compete on cost. It doesn't matter how majestic they are. So two giant, efficient engines have beaten four. The math of the modern world favors the twins. And honestly, that, more than anything else, is the entire reason the GE9X exists. It's the answer to a question the four-engine giants could never solve, which is, how do you move that many people across an entire ocean while burning as little fuel as humanly possible? The answer turned out to be one absurdly large, absurdly efficient pair of engines instead of four smaller ones. But wait. If twin-engine jets are so much cheaper and more efficient, why did we ever build four-engine giants in the first place? Why didn't airlines just use two engines from the start and save all that money? It's a great question. And the answer is one of the most important and least known stories in aviation. It comes down to four letters. ETOPS. Here's the deal. For a long time, there was a strict safety rule. If you were flying a plane with only two engines, you were never allowed to be more than 60 minutes of flying time away from the nearest airport. The logic was simple and a little scary. If one of your two engines failed, you'd be down to a single engine. And the regulators wanted you to be able to limp to a runway within an hour, just in case the second one quit too. For a four-engine plane, this rule didn't apply because losing one of four engines still left you with three. So if you wanted to fly long, remote routes, straight across the Atlantic, or worse, across the vast empty Pacific, you basically had to have three or four engines. A twin simply wasn't allowed to take the direct route over all that open water. That single rule is the reason the 747, the A340, the A380, and the DC-10 existed in the form they did. The oceans demanded extra engines. Not because two good engines couldn't physically do the job, but because the rules, written in an era of less reliable engines, wouldn't let them. But then engines got better. Dramatically better. As high-bypass turbofans like the JT9D's descendants matured, they became staggeringly reliable. Modern engines can fly for tens of thousands of hours between problems. And as that reliability became undeniable, regulators slowly, cautiously, began to relax the rule. This is where ETOPS comes in. It stands for Extended Range Twin-Engine Operational Performance Standards, though pilots love the grim old joke that it really stands for engines turn or passengers swim. Under ETOPS, a twin-engine jet that proved its engines were reliable enough could be certified to fly further and further from a diversion airport. First, 90 minutes. Then, 120. Then, 180. Eventually, some twins earned ratings letting them fly more than 5.5 hours away from the nearest runway on a single engine if they had to. And that changed everything. Remember the JT9D? Its enhanced version, the JT9D-7R4, was approved for 180-minute ETOPS for twin jets back in June 1985. That kind of approval is what opened the door. Once a twin could legally fly those long over-water routes, the entire economic case for four engines collapsed. Why pay to buy, fuel, and maintain four engines when two reliable ones could now fly the same route, legally, for far less money? The 777, with its giant GE90 engines, became the poster child for this new era, crossing oceans on just two power plants and printing money for airlines doing it. The four-engine giants were, quietly, doomed from that point on. Not by a better airplane, but by a rule change made possible by engines that simply refused to brake. So when you sit on a twin engine 787 or A350 flying 14 hours over the open Pacific today, you're flying a route that would have been completely illegal for a twin just a few decades ago. The only reason you can do it is that those two big engines under the wings have become so reliable that the regulators trust them to get you there. Every time you cross an ocean on two engines, you're trusting a half-century of relentless reliability engineering. That's not a small thing. That's one of the quiet miracles of modern travel. If this is the kind of stuff that fascinates you as much as it fascinates me, go ahead and hit subscribe and ring that notification bell because I go deep on exactly this kind of thing every single week. Now, before we travel back in time, I want to throw in a bonus round because there's one Boeing jet I've been deliberately holding back and it tells the single best story about how this whole engine rivalry actually plays out in the real world. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The 787 is special for our purposes because unlike the 777X or the A350, it doesn't have just one engine option. It has two. Airlines buying a Dreamliner get to choose between the General Electric GX, the same engine family that powers the 747-8 and the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000. Two completely different engines from the two titans of the wide-body world going head-to-head on the exact same airframe. On paper, they're remarkably close. Both produce roughly 74,000 pounds of thrust depending on the variant. The Trent 1000 actually boasts a slightly higher bypass ratio around 10 to 1, the highest of any Trent engine. The GX counters with composite fan blades and lightweight titanium aluminide turbine blades. It looked, for a while, like a genuinely even fight. And then reality intervened in a way that shows you just how brutal this business can be. Starting around 2016, the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 began suffering serious durability problems. All Nippon Airways, the engine's very first customer, was the first to discover turbine blade corrosion and cracking. Then the issues spread. Air New Zealand, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, and others were forced to temporarily ground some of their 787s for inspections and engine swaps. At one point, the cracking problems in the turbine section forced dozens of aircraft out of service. It became, in the words of Rolls-Royce's own executives, the single most important issue facing the company. The unscheduled groundings cost Rolls-Royce hundreds of millions of pounds in a single year, and the total bill for fixing everything ran into the billions. Rolls-Royce poured enormous resources into a series of fixes and improved engine packages to claw its way back to reliability. And to their credit, they largely did. But the reputational damage was done, and the market punished it hard. Before the troubles, orders for the two engines were split fairly evenly. After the troubles, airlines voted with their wallets. Even loyal Trent 1000 operators like ANA and Air New Zealand started ordering the GE engine for their new Dreamliners instead. Today, the GX absolutely dominates the 787 order book, holding the substantial majority of the market, while the Trent 1000 share shrank to roughly a third. Same airplane. Same mission. But one engine stumbled at the wrong moment, and the consequences echoed for a decade. It's a sobering reminder of what's really at stake in these engine programs. We spend this whole video marveling at fan diameters and thrust records, but for the airlines, the number that matters most isn't size or even raw power. It's reliability. It's how often the engine has to come off the wing for maintenance. An engine that's a little less powerful but never lets you down will beat a slightly stronger engine that grounds your fleet every single time. The Dreamliner engine war is the clearest proof of that you'll ever find. And here's the lovely connecting thread. That Trent 1000? Rolls-Royce took its architecture and developed it directly into the Trent XWB, the engine that now powers the A350 exclusively and that we praised so highly back in round two. So the engine family that struggled on the evolved into one of the most successful and reliable engines on the Airbus A350. Lessons learned on one jet paying off on its rival. The engine world really is one giant interconnected web. Now, before we tally up the final score, I want to take you on a quick trip back in time because the size of today's engines only makes sense when you see where they came from. And this little piece of history is honestly one of the most dramatic chapters in aviation, full of failure, panic, and eventual triumph. Let's go back to the original 747, the very first jumbo jet in the late 1960s. That airplane needed an engine unlike anything that had existed before. Something with this new high bypass idea, big fan, lots of bypass air, the concept we talked about earlier. And the engine chosen for the job was the Pratt & Whitney JT9D. It was the very first high bypass ratio turbofan ever designed to power a wide body airliner. It was a genuine leap into the unknown, and it very nearly ended in disaster. Because the JT9D ran into a nightmare of a problem during testing, something the engineers called ovalization. Here's what was happening. The engine casing is a big metal tube that's supposed to stay perfectly round at all times. But during the massive stress of takeoff thrust, the casing would actually warp, distorting from a perfect circle into a slight oval shape. Now, this warp was tiny. We're talking about But in the brutally tight tolerances inside a jet engine, that may as well have been a mile. The warping caused the spinning turbine blades to rub against the inside of the casing, which wrecked the engine's performance and could even cause it to fail outright. And it got bad. At one point, the situation was so dire that Boeing had around 30 brand new, finished 747S sitting outside their factory, completely unable to fly. And because the planes were done, but the engines weren't ready, Boeing hung concrete blocks from the empty engine pylons to keep the parked aircraft balanced while everyone waited for redesigned engines. Picture that. 30 of the most advanced, most expensive airplanes in the world sitting in a parking lot with literal blocks of concrete dangling where their engines should be. It was a genuine crisis that could have sunk both the 747 program and Pratt & Whitney along with it. But Boeing and Pratt & Whitney locked themselves in a room together in 1969 and solved it. They fixed the ovalization, the engine got certified, and in January 1970, it entered service on Pan Am's very first 747 flights. That earliest version, the JT9D-3, produced about 43,500 pounds of thrust and had a fan of roughly 93 inches. Now sit with that number for a second because it's the whole point of this history lesson. 43,500 pounds of thrust was considered a staggering, world-changing amount of power in 1970. It was the most powerful commercial engine of its era, the thing that made the jumbo jet age possible. And today, a single GE9X on the 777X is dialed back to 110,000 pounds of thrust in normal service and can hit over 134,000 in testing. One modern engine produces roughly three times the thrust of the engine that launched the entire widebody era. That's how far we've come in about 50 years. The engine that once needed concrete counterweights and nearly bankrupted its maker has been utterly eclipsed and the JT9D wasn't a failure in the end. Far from it. It went on to power not just the 747, but the Boeing 767 and in a lovely twist for our Boeing versus Airbus theme, the Airbus A300 and A310 as well. The very same engine family on both sides of the rivalry right from the early days. By 2020, the JT9D had flown more than 169 million hours. It earned its retirement. There's one more engine I have to mention because it might be the most important engine in this entire video, even though it's not the biggest or the most powerful. The CFM56. The CFM56 is a high bypass turbofan built by CFM International that joint venture between America's GE and France's Safran. And here's why it matters so much. It is the best-selling jet engine in the history of commercial aviation. It is the most produced commercial jet engine ever built. Over 30,000 of them have been delivered, with some counts running well above 33,000 when you include every variant. These engines have collectively flown more than a billion flight hours. A billion. That number is almost meaningless to the human brain. And here's the part that ties our whole rivalry together with a bow. The CFM56 powered both sides. It powered essentially all the Boeing 737 Classic and 737 Next Generation jets with the CFM56-7B and its relatives. And it also powered the Airbus A320 family, the original A320 CEO generation with the CFM56-5B. The single best-selling engine in history hung under the wings of both great rivals, quietly making the modern single-aisle world possible for both of them at the same time. It had a fan diameter in the range of roughly 60 to 68 inches, and a bypass ratio around 5 or 6 to 1, which tells you just how much bigger and how much higher bypass today's Leap and Pratt & Whitney geared engines have become by comparison. The CFM56 is the grandparent of the narrowbody engines we compared all the way back in round one. The LEAP, 1A and LEAP, 1B that power today's A320neo and 737MX are its direct descendants. So, when you watched those two square off at the start of this video, you were really watching the children of the most successful engine ever built, each one grown bigger and smarter than its parent. Now, there's one more engine I genuinely can't skip because it's the bridge between the old world and the record-breaking GE9X we keep coming back to, and it has one of the best stories in the whole business, the GE90. Back in the early 1990s, GE made a gamble that a lot of people thought was borderline insane. They were building a brand new engine for the original Boeing 777, and they decided to make the fan blades out of carbon fiber. Carbon fiber composite, epoxy and woven fibers instead of the solid titanium that every serious jet engine fan had used up to that point. This had never been successfully done in commercial aviation, not once. Regulators were skeptical. Boeing itself needed convincing. GE engineers had to sit down with the FAA and with Boeing and basically teach them, from scratch, why a blade made of what sounds like high-tech plastic wouldn't simply shatter the first time a bird flew into it. But the gamble paid off spectacularly. When the GE90 debuted on a British Airways 777 in 1995, it carried commercial aviation's first ever carbon fiber composite fan blades, and the numbers were jaw-dropping. Each of those blades measures more than four feet long, yet weighs less than 50 pounds. The composite material delivers roughly double the strength of titanium at about one-third of the weight. By using composites, GE shaved around 400 pounds off the engine while making it stronger, quieter and more efficient. Those blades were so beautiful in an engineering sense that one of them is now on permanent display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An actual jet engine fan blade sitting in an art museum. And the GE90 didn't just innovate, it set records that stood for years. The most powerful version, the GE90-115B is certified at around 115,000 pounds of thrust, making it the most powerful engine ever to enter regular commercial service at the time. And during a certification test back in 2002, it cranked out an astonishing 127,900 pounds of thrust, which earned it a Guinness World Record as the most powerful jet engine on the planet. That record stood until its own descendant, the GE9X, finally broke it decades later The GE90's fan measured 1-2-8 inches across, which, you guessed it, is wider than the fuselage of many narrowbody aircraft. Sound familiar? The GE9X simply took that same winning formula and stretched it another 6 inches, so the lineage is gorgeous when you lay it out. The GE90 pioneered the composite fan blade and the fan-wider-than-a-fuselage concept. The GE9X inherited all of it and pushed it to the absolute limit. And both of them, every single one, were built exclusively for Boeing's 777 family. That's a 30-year unbroken chain of GE building the biggest engines in the world specifically to keep the 777 on top. But here's a question that probably popped into your head somewhere around Round 2. How can the GE9X be the biggest engine ever, run hotter than anything before it, and still be lighter and more efficient than its predecessor? Bigger usually means heavier. Hotter usually means it wears out faster. How does it break both of those rules at once? The answer is materials. And this is honestly the most futuristic part of the whole story. So stick with me, because it's wild. Inside the hottest part of a jet engine, right behind where the fuel burns, temperatures get absolutely brutal. We're talking about heat that would melt most metals like butter. For decades, the only way engineers dealt with this was by using exotic metal superalloys and then bleeding off a big chunk of cool air and constantly blowing it over those metal parts just to keep them from melting. But here's the catch. Every bit of cooling air you steal for that job is air that isn't being used to make the engine more efficient. It's a tax you pay just to keep the thing from destroying itself. So GE did something genuinely revolutionary on the GE9X. They started making parts out of something called Ceramic Matrix Composites, or CMCs. Now, when you hear ceramic, you probably think of a coffee mug, something that shatters the second you drop it. But these aren't your kitchen ceramics. CMCs are made of silicon carbide ceramic fibers woven into a ceramic matrix with special proprietary coatings. And the result is a material that's about one third the density of metal. So much lighter, but can withstand staggering temperatures. The CMC parts in the LEAP engine, for example, can handle around 1,300 degrees Celsius. The introduction of CMCs essentially handed engineers an instant 300 degree Fahrenheit jump in heat tolerance, a leap it had previously taken And here's the payoff. Because CMC parts can take the heat without needing nearly as much cooling air, you can run the engine hotter, divert less air to babysitting the hot section, and squeeze dramatically more efficiency out of every drop of fuel. The GE9X carries several CMC components in its hot section, and they're a big part of why it's the most fuel-efficient engine GE has ever built. The breakthrough was so significant that it took GE's research labs decades to perfect, with the work tracing all the way back to the late 1980s. Sometimes the biggest leaps in aviation aren't about making things bigger at all. They're about inventing an entirely new material that didn't exist before. And it gets even more sci-fi. The GE9X contains roughly 303 deprinted parts. Yes, 3D printed. The same basic idea as a desktop printer. Except these machines fuse metal powder layer by layer into incredibly complex shapes that you simply couldn't manufacture any other way. These printed parts come together to form several key components, including the engine's famous 3D printed fuel nozzles, plus temperature sensors, fuel mixers, heat exchangers, and foot-long low-pressure turbine blades. Printing them this way lets engineers make shapes that are lighter and more intricate than anything a traditional factory could carve, which shaves off even more weight. So that giant engine on the 777X isn't just big. It's stuffed with carbon fiber blades, space-age ceramics, and printed metal parts. It might be the most technologically advanced object most of us will ever stand next to. Now, I want to circle back to the Airbus side for a moment, because there's an engine on the A320's history that deserves a mention, and it ties our two rivals together yet again. When the original A320 first launched, it didn't only fly with the CFM56. Airbus also offered a completely different engine called the IAE V2500. The V2500 was built by a consortium called International Aero Engines, which brought together Pratt & Whitney, Germany's MTU, Japanese partners, and others. Over 7,000 of these engines have been delivered, with thrust ranging from around 22,000 to 33,000 pounds. For years, the CFM56 and the V2500 fought a quiet war for every A320 order, the same way Leap and Pratt and Whitney's geared engine fight over the A320neo today. The narrowbody engine rivalry isn't new. It's been raging for nearly 40 years, just with different names on the engines. Okay, so now let's add it all up, round by round, and crown a winner. But I want to do it honestly, because the truth has a lot more nuance in it than a simple, this brand wins, that brand loses. Narrowbodies? Round one? Airbus's A320neo carries the bigger engines, up to that 81-inch Pratt & Whitney fan versus the 69-inch fan on the Boeing 737MX. Point to Airbus, and mostly thanks to a more modern airframe that gave their engineers room to play with, instead of a 60-year-old design fighting the ground for clearance. Widebodies? Round two? Boeing wins, and it wins decisively. The GE9X on the 777X is the largest, and by raw test numbers, the most powerful, commercial jet engine ever built. As of the mid-2020s, the Boeing 777X holds the title for the aircraft with the most powerful commercial engines in the world. Nothing the A350's Trent XWB carries, brilliant as that engine is, can match that record-breaking 134-inch fan. Four-engine giants? Round three? It's a tie that history itself is quietly ending. Both the 747 and the A380 are sailing off into retirement, beaten not really by each other, but by the relentless, unsentimental efficiency of two big modern engines doing the work that used to take four. So if you're keeping score on pure engine size and raw power, Boeing's lineup takes the overall crown, and it's carried almost entirely on the shoulders of that one absurd GE9X. It's the single biggest engine in the sky, and it genuinely isn't close. But here's where I want to stop and be completely fair to Airbus, because raw size is a seductive but deeply incomplete way to judge an engine. The Trent XWB on the A350 is widely considered one of the most efficient large engines in service anywhere in the world. Remember, it was chosen by nine out of the ten most profitable airlines on Earth. Those airlines didn't pick it because it's the biggest. They picked it because it makes them money, day in and day out, by being phenomenally efficient and reliable. An engine doesn't have to be the biggest to be brilliant. Sometimes the smartest engineering in the room is the engine that does almost as much while burning noticeably less fuel and costing noticeably less to run. And that, right there, is the real lesson buried inside all of these numbers we've thrown around today. We started this whole thing obsessed with size. Whose engine is bigger? Whose fan is wider? And look, it's a genuinely fun way to look at airplanes. I get it. Bigger just feels like better. There's something primal about standing next to a GE9X and feeling tiny. But the deeper you go, the more you realize that the engineers chasing the future aren't actually chasing size at all. The GE9X got bigger specifically so it could waste less. The four-engine era died, not because four engines weren't powerful enough, but because two smarter engines could do the same job for less. The whole history of jet propulsion from that troubled JT9D with concrete blocks hanging off the 747 all the way up to today's record breakers points in exactly the same direction. Not toward raw power. Toward doing more with less. Toward efficiency. Toward not burning a single drop of fuel you don't absolutely have to burn. And here's where it gets really exciting, because the next chapter might throw out the rulebook entirely. For decades now, every engine we've talked about has had its fan wrapped inside a casing, that big round cowling you see at the front. But the engine makers are running into a wall. After 50 years of steady improvement, traditional ducted engines are bumping up against the limits of physics. You can only make the fan so big before the casing around it becomes too heavy and creates too much drag. So CFM, that same GE and Safran joint venture behind the best-selling engines in the world, is working on something genuinely radical. It's called the RISE program, and at its heart is an open fan engine. Picture a jet engine, but with the casing stripped away, leaving a set of large curved fan blades spinning out in the open air. It looks strange to modern eyes, almost like a throwback to old propeller planes, but it combines the efficiency of a turboprop with the speed and performance of a modern jet. By ditching the heavy casing, the fan can get even bigger and move even more air. CFM is targeting more than a 20% reduction in fuel burn and emissions compared to today's most efficient engines. That would be the single biggest leap in engine efficiency they've ever achieved. And get this, to test it, Airbus and CFM are planning to bolt one of these open fan demonstrators onto an Airbus A380, the very super jumbo we just watched fade into retirement and fly it as a testbed by the end of the decade, with a possible entry into service for a new generation of aircraft around 2035. So the dying giant of yesterday might end up being the launch pad for the propulsion of tomorrow. Both Airbus and Boeing are watching this closely because whoever adopts the right next generation engine first could gain a decisive edge in the narrowbody war that started this whole video. The fight never ends. It just moves to the next round. It's kind of a beautiful thing to sit with, honestly. The most impressive machines we've ever bolted to a wing got that way. Not by being the loudest, or the most violent, or even the most powerful. They got there by being the most thoughtful. That record-breaking GE9X, the biggest engine in the entire world, is at its heart a machine obsessed with restraint. It's huge, precisely so it can be gentle. And think about the cast of characters we met along the way. The JT9D, the pioneer that nearly bankrupted Pratt & Whitney and had finished 747S sitting in a parking lot with concrete blocks dangling from their wings before it grew up to fly 169 million hours. The CFM56, the humble bestseller that quietly powered both Boeing and Airbus to a billion flight hours without ever being the biggest or the flashiest. The GE90, the mad gamble on carbon fiber blades that ended up in an art museum. The Trent 1000, the engine that stumbled hard on the Dreamliner, but whose DNA lives on, triumphant under the wing of the A350. And the GE9X, the current king, stuffed with space-age ceramics and printed metal, holding back 18% of its strength like a champion who's already won. Every one of those engines tells the same story from a different angle. None of them won by being simply the biggest. They won by being the right answer to a hard question at the right moment, more reliably than the competition. That's the real game underneath the Boeing versus Airbus rivalry. It was never really about the logos on the tail. It was always about the quiet geniuses building the machines that hang under the wings. So next time you're sitting in a window seat, watching that giant fan slowly spin up just before takeoff, take one second to really appreciate what you're looking at. You're not just looking at a machine. You're looking at decades of brilliant, stubborn engineers on both sides of the Boeing-Airbus divide, asking themselves the same patient question over and over and over again. Not how do we make it stronger, but how do we make it smarter? How do we move more people more safely while burning less of the planet's fuel and making less noise over the neighborhoods below? And that question, the one Boeing and Airbus and GE and Rolls-Royce and Pratt and Whitney have all been quietly racing to answer for the better part of a century, is the real reason flying keeps getting safer and cheaper and cleaner for every single one of us year after year after year. So which side are you on? Team Boeing with that monster GE9X or Team Airbus with the elegant, efficient Trent XWB? Drop it in the comments. Let's hear it. And if you made it all the way to the end of this one, you're exactly my kind of aviation nerd. So do me a favor, hit that like button, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.