The GE9XTM engine lifted off on March 13 under wing of GE Aviation’s 747 flying testbed in Victorville, California, for its first flight test. Designed specifically for the Boeing 777X airplane, the GE9X will be the most fuel-efficient jet engine GE has ever produced. The aircraft took to the air around 10:40 a.m. Pacific standard time and flew for more than four hours on its first flight. During the flight, the aircraft and engine completed the entire test card and validated key operational and functional characteristics enabling the test campaign to progress in subsequent flights.

GE9X will also feature an impressive 11.2 ft-wide front fan, 16 carbon fibre composite blades, a next-generation pressure ratio and a new combuster for high efficiency and low emissions. More than 700 orders have already been put in by airlines across the world, including Cathay Pacific and Emirates, GE Aviation said. Ted Ingling, general manager of of the GE9X program, said: “The GE9X and Victorville teams have spent months preparing for flight testing of the engine, and their efforts paid off with a picture-perfect first flight. GE understandably doesn’t want the test engine to be the only one keeping an aircraft in the air. So it has a testbed plane, a four-engined Boeing 747, with one of its engines replaced by the new one. The “GE Propulsion Test Platform” has three standard CF6 engines, a workhorse that GE has been making since the 1970s in various, often modernized versions and one giant GE9X. The three older engines provide enough power to keep the plane in the air in case the new one fails.

The engine, which has undergone several other ground-based tests across the United States and Canada, is expected to be certified for flight in 2019.