General Electric F404

The General Electric F404 and F412 are a family of afterburning turbofan engines in the 10,500 to 19,000 pounds-force class, produced by GE Aerospace, with Volvo Aero as a partner that builds the RM12 variant. GE developed the F404 for the F/A-18 Hornet shortly after losing the F-15 engine competition to Pratt and Whitney, and based it on the YJ101 engine it had built for the Northrop YF-17, enlarging the bypass ratio from 0.20 to 0.34 for better fuel efficiency. The original F404-GE-400 has a three-stage fan, a seven-stage axial compressor, single-stage low and high pressure turbines and an augmentor, and it produces 16,000 pounds-force of maximum thrust. Reliability and cost were the main design goals, and the F404 was developed into the larger F414 turbofan and the experimental GE36 civil propfan.