Inside Dowty's Role in CFM's RISE Open Fan Engine: What It Means for UK Engineering Jobs

There is a jet engine in active development with no casing around its fan. That single fact represents the most significant change to commercial aircraft propulsion since the turbofan itself, and a century-old propeller company in Gloucestershire that almost no passenger has heard of is one of the reasons anyone believes it will actually work. GE Aerospace has already put more than £12 million directly into that company to fund the hiring campaign behind it.

This guide covers the full technical picture of why the engine casing is disappearing, why Dowty Propellers specifically is central to solving that problem, every engineering discipline currently being recruited for, what each entry route actually pays, and the security clearance requirement that quietly disqualifies more applicants than anything else on this list.

The Aerodynamic Problem RISE Is Actually Solving

For fifty years, jet engine efficiency has been driven almost entirely by one number: bypass ratio, the volume of air that flows around the engine core relative to the air passing through it. Move more cold air around the core at a gentler speed and both efficiency and noise improve. The CFM56 operated at roughly 6:1. The current-generation CFM LEAP has pushed that to about 11:1.

The physical limit is the casing itself. As fan diameter grows to increase bypass ratio, the surrounding nacelle has to expand with it, and a larger nacelle adds drag and structural weight that eventually cancels out the efficiency gain. This establishes a real ceiling for ducted turbofans at around 15:1. RISE, the Revolutionary Innovation for Sustainable Engines programme run by CFM International (the 50-50 joint venture between GE Aerospace and Safran Aircraft Engines), targets bypass ratios exceeding 60:1, achievable only by removing the duct entirely.

This is not a new idea. Unducted "propfan" engines were tested in the 1970s and 80s in response to the oil crisis, and prototypes like the GE36 achieved fuel efficiency gains up to 30 percent. They were shelved anyway: plunging oil prices killed the economic case, and the engines were notoriously loud, relying on complex contra-rotating fan stages that struggled to meet airport acoustic regulations.

What makes the modern revival genuinely different, not just a repeat of the 1980s attempt, comes down to four specific engineering advances:

Single-stage rotor with static Outlet Guide Vanes. Instead of the noisy contra-rotating design of the 1980s, RISE uses one rotating stage of fan blades followed by a stationary row of vanes that de-swirl the airflow, recovering kinetic energy that would otherwise be lost as turbulence. The pitch of these static vanes can close almost completely on landing, acting as an air brake and eliminating the weight of traditional thrust reversers entirely.

Supercomputing-driven aeroacoustics. Engineers are using systems like the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, capable of over a quintillion calculations per second, to model airflow and acoustic propagation with a level of fidelity that simply did not exist in the 1980s. Early wind tunnel tests indicate the aeroacoustic performance has already exceeded technology maturation objectives.

Advanced composite materials. The blades use 3D-woven carbon fibre composites injected with aerospace-grade resin, engineered to survive bird strikes and foreign object debris at a scale and exposure the ducted era never had to solve for.

Adaptive cycle technology. Also called variable bypass architecture, this lets the engine modulate airflow to reduce core temperatures during cruise and improve particle extraction, directly addressing the dust and sand ingestion problems that plagued 1980s open-rotor durability.

GE Aerospace's Arjan Hegeman, Vice President of Future of Flight Engineering, frames the whole approach simply: "We know how to do turbofans, and what we're adding in front of it is a turboprop." The high-pressure core relies on decades of mature turbofan development. The cold, low-pressure propulsive section borrows directly from turboprop lineage, which is precisely why a company with turboprop heritage sits at the centre of this programme.

Why a Century-Old Propeller Company Is the Answer

Building a turboprop that behaves like this at commercial jet scale is a genuinely narrow specialism, and it is exactly what Dowty Propellers has done since the 1930s. The company's roots trace to Rotol Airscrews, a wartime joint venture between Rolls-Royce and Bristol Engines that built propellers for the Spitfire, Hurricane, Halifax and Wellington. Its foundational technology, the Hele-Shaw Beacham variable-pitch propeller, is a 1920s hydraulic pitch-change system developed with the Gloster Aircraft Company, solving precisely the problem RISE's exposed blades face today: changing pitch on demand to optimise thrust and act as an air brake on landing.

The manufacturing pedigree runs just as deep. In 1984 Dowty certified the world's first all-composite propeller blades, for the Saab 340 regional airliner. Since then it has produced over 25,000 composite blades, logging more than 300 million in-service flight hours across aircraft from the Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 to the Lockheed Martin C-130J Hercules, plus specialised platforms like the Textron LCAC hovercraft and the ShinMaywa US-2 amphibious aircraft. Some original Saab 340 blades are still flying past 50,000 flight hours. Dowty's Technical Director Jonathan Chesney notes this experience has taught the company exactly what is required to make a durable, maintainable product, data CFM needs directly, since airlines will expect an exposed RISE blade to match the reliability of one protected inside a casing.

Dowty's production relies on Resin Transfer Moulding: dry carbon fibre preforms, unidirectional spars, 45-degree braided outer shells over a polyurethane foam core, injected with toughened epoxy under precise temperature and pressure. To scale this, Dowty led the Digital Propulsion (DigiProp) programme, supported by the UK's High Value Manufacturing Catapult network (the AMRC, the National Composites Centre, and the Manufacturing Technology Centre), digitising production through foam thermoforming via Langzauner Heated Presses, robotic ultrasonic trimming using multiaxial KSL 3D robotic arms, and parametric digital twins that compress what the company describes as thousands of years of manual calculation into weeks.

This capability extends beyond RISE itself. At the 2026 Farnborough International Airshow, GE Aerospace, NASA, BETA Technologies and Boeing's Aurora Flight Sciences flew a modified Saab 340B for over two hours using a fully integrated megawatt-class hybrid-electric propulsion system, GE motor/generators, Avio Aero gearboxes, and Dowty propellers, all built on a CT7 engine. That flight-test data feeds directly toward eventually integrating electrical power distribution into the RISE Open Fan itself.

Dowty's current Brockworth facility sits on the old Gloster aerodrome, where Britain's first jet, the Gloster E.28/39, ran its early taxi tests in 1941, the site where British jet propulsion began is now engineering what replaces it. The facility itself is relatively new: an 80 percent-destroying fire hit the original Staverton factory in 2015, forcing a full recovery and eventual relocation to the purpose-built Brockworth site.

The Macroeconomic Backing, and Why It Matters for Job Security

GE Aerospace has invested over £12 million directly into Dowty for new machinery, expanded testing capability, and hiring. That sits inside a much larger UK government commitment: the Aerospace Technology Institute's Engineering Growth strategy, backed by £2.3 billion in government funding under the 2025 Modern Industrial Strategy, rising to £8 billion once matched by industry. The stated goal is capturing a dominant UK share of what the ATI estimates as a $41 billion future single-aisle aircraft market by 2050, with ATI analysis suggesting programmes like RISE could cumulatively avoid 3 to 16 gigatonnes of carbon emissions by 2070.

This is not an isolated bet. The same government-backed anchoring strategy shows up elsewhere in UK aerospace, a £10 million funding package to Vertical Aerospace in Bristol, for instance, was designed specifically to secure over 1,000 direct engineering jobs building electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft on British soil. The pattern across the sector is deliberate: keep the intellectual property, supply chains and high-value manufacturing jobs in the UK before airframe manufacturers like Airbus or Boeing select a technology for their next generation of aircraft.

Every Engineering Discipline Currently Hiring

On the production floor specifically, Dowty continuously hires Blade Operators on fixed-term and permanent contracts to execute foam shaping, blade building, resin injection and deflashing.

Every Entry Route, In Detail

The apprenticeship route is genuinely not a lesser path. Lewis Kempson, a Dowty apprentice, won Outstanding Apprentice of the Year (Gloucestershire) in 2021 after project-managing part of the factory relocation following the 2015 fire while still in his second year, and later completed a degree in product design off the back of it.

Security Clearance - What Applies Here

Due to the sensitive nature of aerospace technology and strict export control regulations, nearly all early-career positions in this pipeline require Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) clearance. In practice this means:

Applicants must hold the permanent right to work in the UK, since sponsorship is rarely available at this level for early-career roles.

BPSS verifies identity, an unspent criminal record check, and a recent employment/education history, straightforward for most UK-resident graduates, but worth confirming if you have spent significant time studying or working abroad.

More senior roles within the wider GE Aerospace and Safran ecosystem, particularly anything touching classified or export-controlled technical data at a higher tier, may require Security Check (SC) level clearance, which additionally requires five continuous years of UK residency, a rule that catches out international students and returning UK expats who assume citizenship alone is sufficient.

What Life Is Actually Like

The good: this is genuinely frontier propulsion engineering, not incremental commercial work, RISE is one of the most significant programmes in the industry, and Dowty's narrow, century-deep specialism in variable-pitch and composite manufacturing is not easily replicated elsewhere. The apprenticeship route is debt-free and leads to a fully funded degree. GE Aerospace's direct £12 million investment, backed by a multi-billion-pound government strategy, signals real, funded job security rather than speculative hiring tied to one contract.

The honest downsides: this remains a highly regulated, multi-decade industry. ARP4754 and ARP4761 safety frameworks mean engineering approval cycles are genuinely slower than commercial tech, and the culture rewards patience with compartmentalised, safety-critical work rather than fast iteration. RISE itself will not power a passenger-carrying aircraft for years yet, so day-to-day work is developmental and demonstrator-focused, not production-line immediate. Because so much of this touches export-controlled technology, career mobility outside the UK defence-adjacent aerospace ecosystem is more constrained than in a purely commercial software role.

If You Don't Get In Here

Dowty is one node in a much larger UK propulsion and composites ecosystem, not the only door in. GE Aerospace's Cheltenham site runs parallel EEDP rotations. Safran's wider UK group includes Safran Landing Systems in Gloucester, which offers its own Materials Science Technologist Degree Apprenticeship with the University of Derby, focused on metallurgical testing and chemical analysis for landing gear components, a genuinely different specialism using overlapping composites and materials science skills. More broadly, the same RTM, PFMEA and Lean manufacturing skill set this guide covers is in demand across the wider UK aerospace supply chain, not exclusively at this one site — worth tracking Tier 2 and Tier 3 composite suppliers if Dowty specifically doesn't come through.

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