Rolls-Royce to invest over £30m in new Washington aerospace facility

Rolls-Royce has announced plans to invest more than £30m at its site in Washington, Tyne & Wear, UK, creating a new facility to manufacture a range of aerospace discs for in-service engines. The new Fleet Support plant is expected to be fully operational in 2018 and will sit alongside its UK discs manufacturing facility, which officially opened in June 2014. The new investment is part of Rolls-Royce’s ongoing industrial transformation and marks the final stage of the modernisation programme for disc manufacturing in the North East of England. The construction of a new facility will allow Rolls-Royce to make use of our specialist workforce and agile manufacturing techniques. It will also complete the planned closure of the existing site in nearby Sunderland, which is over 60 years old. The new 8000 m² facility will have the capacity to manufacture well over 1,500 fan and turbine discs a year for use in a wide-range of existing engines, including Civil Aerospace applications (Trent 500, Trent 800 and the RB211 engines) and alongside the Defence Aerospace applications (EJ200 and Adour engines). Fan discs and turbine discs are at the heart of the engine, operating in extreme conditions.