The F119 resulted from the Joint Advanced Fighter Engine (JAFE) program in the early 1980s aimed at supplying the powerplant for the Air Force's
Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) and the Navy's Advanced Carrier-Based Multirole Fighter (VFMX). Detailed design of Pratt & Whitney's submission, designated internally as PW5000, began when the request for proposals (RFP) for JAFE, later renamed the ATF Engine (ATFE) program with the cancellation of VFMX, was released in May 1983. Advances in engine technology, such as those from the Advanced Turbine Engine Gas Generator (ATEGG) and the Joint Technology Demonstration Engine (JTDE) programs, allowed the design to do more
work with fewer stages, with the PW5000's compressor having only 6 stages compared to the 10 stages in the
F100's compressor. The high pressure and low pressure
turbines were single stage and counter-rotating, which reduced the gyroscopic forces on the engine; it was hoped that counter-rotation would eliminate a row of turbine stators for a vaneless high and low pressure turbine interface, which would save weight and reduce parts count, but this was ultimately not successful and the stators were retained. The fan and compressor stages were to use
integrally bladed rotors (IBR), also known as blisks, to reduce weight and cost and improve performance. Owing to the ATF's demanding requirements for supercruise, the PW5000 design has low bypass ratio, high core and turbine inlet temperatures, and a fully variable convergent-divergent nozzle to achieve high
specific thrust in intermediate, or non-afterburning power. The combustor, internally named Floatwall, eliminated welds to mitigate crack growth due to thermal cycling. The original RFP called for maximum thrust in the class for an aircraft gross weight of . Pratt & Whitney and
General Electric were selected to make prototype engines, designated YF119 and
YF120 respectively, for demonstration and validation (Dem/Val). Both engine makers would provide engines for both the Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics
YF-22 and the Northrop/McDonnell Douglas
YF-23 ATF technology and flight demonstrators. The ATF's increasing weight during development required more thrust to meet the performance requirements; as gross weight grew to , the required thrust was increased by 20% to over in military/intermediate power and class in full afterburner. On 3 August 1991, Pratt & Whitney was awarded the full-scale development, or engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract for ATF engine, while the Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics team won the contract for the ATF airframe. While the YF119 was a more conventional design compared to the General Electric's variable cycle YF120, Pratt & Whitney accrued far greater test hours (50% more) and emphasized reliability and the lower risk. A total of 507 engines were produced. The F119 Heavy Maintenance Center (HMC) for depot overhaul is located at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, with the first overall completed in 2013. Turbine engine advances from ATEGG and JTDE continued with the
Integrated High Performance Turbine Engine Technology (IHPTET) program, with applications in F119 improvement packages and derivatives. Prototype YF119 variants powered the
Boeing X-32 and
Lockheed Martin X-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) concept demonstrator aircraft, and subsequent full scale development of the F119 derivative resulted in the
F135 family of engines that powers the
Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. For the future of the F119-PW-100, Pratt & Whitney secured a 1.5 billion dollar contract in February 2025 to sustain the engines. Along with this sustainment Pratt & Whitney will also modernize the engine with things such as ease of maintenance, availability and general modernization ==Design==