Gas Turbines: Shared Machinery, Distinct Aviation and Industrial Markets
Executive summary
“Gas turbines” cover at least two distinct industries. Aviation engines include turbojets, turbofans, and turboprops; industrial turbines serve power generation, combined heat and power (CHP), direct drive for pumps and compressors, and marine or rail propulsion. Both depend on high-temperature materials and precision components, but their customers, certification systems, and evidence on production scale differ.
Howmet Aerospace reports investment castings, including airfoils, and seamless rolled rings for aircraft engines and industrial gas turbines. Its titanium business is vertically integrated from ingot and mill products through forging, extrusion, and machining for aircraft engine parts. SKF materials document aeroengine bearings and shaft seals, but not shipment volumes or named engine programs.
GE Aerospace reported 2,386 commercial engine deliveries in 2025, including 1,802 LEAP engines. These are actual deliveries, not design capacity. The reviewed sources did not provide comparable manufacturer-level production data for industrial turbine assembly.
Network audit and manufacturing
Direct graph links from aluminum, cobalt, and molybdenum to gas turbines were removed because the collected primary sources did not establish specific feedstock specifications, suppliers, or customer connections. The report retains verified links for titanium, precision castings, bearings, and seals. General statements that an alloy can be used in a turbine are not enough to substantiate a particular supply-chain edge.
Aircraft engines are produced by a small set of specialist manufacturers, including GE Aerospace, RTX/Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce, and Safran. GE's 2025 filing describes its commercial engine and services business across commercial aircraft, business aviation, and aeroderivative uses. It reports supplying engines for narrowbody, widebody, and regional aircraft, with airframers such as Boeing and Airbus among customers.
Industrial gas turbines support simple-cycle and combined-cycle generation, CHP, and direct mechanical drive. A U.S. Department of Energy fact sheet gives capacities of up to 400 MW for simple-cycle turbines; that is a technical maximum in the fact sheet, not the operating output of a specific machine. The reviewed material did not establish manufacturer-specific industrial turbine output or market shares.
Certification, maintenance, and recycling
Aircraft turbine engines operate under FAA type-certification and airworthiness requirements, including 14 CFR Parts 33 and 34, and aerospace quality systems such as IAQG 9100. These aviation requirements should not be generalized to industrial power turbines.
Aircraft-engine end-of-life activity includes maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and reuse of inspected serviceable parts. Boeing's used-serviceable-material program describes parts recovered from retired aircraft or lease returns, inspected and, where needed, repaired before resale to operators and MRO providers. This is component reuse, not evidence of metal recovery rates.
GE Aerospace reports sorting metal turnings by alloy family at its Evendale engine facility and increasing conforming recovered metal returned to its material supply chain by about 80% over two years after a 2022 process-improvement effort. This concerns manufacturing scrap, not metal recovered from retired engines.