A new Pratt & Whitney factory broke ground in Poland on Thursday — and the $100 million commitment behind it is aimed squarely at the compressor and turbine disk shortage that has left Airbus jets idling at completion centers for months.

The timing carries immediate weight: the GTF engine’s total order backlog has surpassed 8,000 units, a level of demand that P&W’s existing production infrastructure cannot serve fast enough — a gap this facility is explicitly designed to close.

The Bottleneck That Made This Factory Necessary

The Rzeszów groundbreaking did not materialize in a vacuum. Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury confirmed publicly that Pratt & Whitney has not fulfilled its engine delivery commitments in 2025 and does not appear on track to do so in 2026, with the aircraft maker explicitly attributing the engine shortfall to constrained delivery guidance and initiating legal proceedings against the supplier.

The chokepoint is specific: compressor and turbine disks, the high-precision rotating components at the core of every engine stage, require isothermal forging under sustained extreme heat — a capital-intensive process with a long qualification lead time that cannot be solved by simply hiring more workers. The new Rzeszów facility will house specialized capabilities for processing isothermally forged parts, covering heat treatment, sonic machining, and inspection operations — the complete downstream chain that transforms raw forgings into flight-certified hardware.

Six Months From Commitment to Concrete

P&W first disclosed the Rzeszów investment at the European Economic Congress in Katowice in April 2026, positioning it as the European component of a dual-continent production push. Thursday’s groundbreaking advances that commitment into active construction, six months after the initial announcement.

Piotr Owsicki, general manager of Pratt & Whitney in Rzeszów, captured the significance of the transition at the ceremony: “Today, we begin turning that plan into reality.”

The event drew President of Rzeszów Konrad Fijołek, Podkarpacie Regional Marshal Władysław Ortyl, and Governor Teresa Kubas-Hul — signaling firm regional governmental backing for the project. Jason Kosmas, VP & GM of the Rotor Core Value Stream at Pratt & Whitney’s Columbus operation, was also in attendance, underscoring how operationally intertwined the Georgia and Poland expansions are. The two facilities are not designed to function independently: Columbus Forge presses the isothermal forgings; Rzeszów machines, heat-treats, and inspects them.

What the Rzeszów Site Already Does

The new building adds capability to an existing complex that already ranks among Pratt & Whitney’s most technically diverse production sites outside the United States. Current Rzeszów output includes the GTF fan drive gear system, F100 static structures, and key F135 parts — the same engine that powers every configuration of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The site also builds engines for helicopters, business jets, and general aviation aircraft across the PT6, PW200, PW500/600, and PW800 families.

Adding a dedicated rotating-disk production line gives P&W the flexibility to balance commercial and military demand from a single geographic footprint, reducing dependence on transatlantic component flows for the most highly stressed hardware in the GTF family.

The 30% Figure Airlines Are Watching Closely

The production commitment attached to the combined Rzeszów and Columbus investments is the number carrier procurement teams will monitor most carefully. According to RTX, both expansions are expected to be fully operational by 2028, delivering a 30% uplift in critical rotating-component output at that point.

In the interim, RTX CEO Christopher Calio pledged on the company’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call that P&W would deliver a record number of GTF engines before year-end — a commitment made as aircraft-on-ground counts across the PW1100-powered fleet had already fallen 25% since the start of 2026. That recovery trend is what the Rzeszów plant is intended to sustain and accelerate once it comes online. Airlines still waiting on new narrowbody deliveries, and Airbus targeting a monthly production rate of 70 to 75 jets by the close of 2027, share a direct interest in whether the 2028 operational timeline holds.

Poland’s Aerospace Identity Takes Shape

RTX’s footprint in Poland now spans three of its major businesses — Collins Aerospace, Raytheon, and Pratt & Whitney — with a combined workforce that makes it the company’s single largest employer base outside the United States. For Rzeszów, a mid-sized city in Poland’s southeastern Podkarpacie region that has spent two decades steadily evolving into a high-complexity aerospace hub, the groundbreaking adds a layer of capability that few European locations can match.

The broader implication: as engine supply chains reconfigure in the post-pandemic era and Western defense industrial bases move to diversify production geographically, Rzeszów’s combination of skilled labor, proven quality infrastructure, and strong bilateral political alignment positions it as an increasingly vital node — one that now comes with $100 million in fresh capital and a clear 2028 deadline attached.