The Absolutely Wild Horsepower Numbers Behind Your Next Flight

Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, “Why do we even use the term ‘horsepower’? Is that to further humiliate horses? The space shuttle rockets have 20 million horsepower. Is there any point in still comparing it to the horses?” Yes, Jerry, it’s because kilowatts and megawatts aren’t as poetic. Gigawatts is a cool word, though, as long as you pronounce it as “jigawatts” like Doc Brown. Still, horsepower has a good ring to it, and it’s just more fun to say that a Koenigsegg One:1 has 1,341 mighty steeds, or an Airbus A380 has a total of 300,000 stallions powering its gravity-defying trajectory into the sky.

Look at that last number again. 300,000 horsepower at takeoff! Splitting that figure between the jet’s four engines yields 75,000 horsepower each. Convert 300,000 horses back to science-speak, and you get 224 megawatts. Now, that may not be poetic, but it does have a terrifying ring to it, like we’re equating jet thrust with nuclear explosion power. 

Maybe Christian Von Koenigsegg was on to something with the one-megawatt option. Let’s see how megawatt rolls off the tongue in a sentence: With more than a megawatt of power at its disposal, Koenigsegg broke its own record by going 0-250-0 mph in 28.27 seconds in the Jesko. Ooh, okay — maybe megawatt can stir strong emotions.

Car engines and jet engines work on thoroughly different principles – unless you want to discuss the Chrysler turbine car – so discussing the horsepower ratings of jets requires digging into technical nitty-gritty. The type of jets you see in most, if not all, commercial airliners are turbofans, though there are other jet types, such as ramjets, scramjets, turbojets, and turboprops, among others. 

In a turbofan, incoming air goes through the first set of fan blades and gets channeled in two directions simultaneously. These are the core compressor and a burner, where it’s ignited and sent through a nozzle, as well as around the engine to create thrust like a normal propeller. The nozzle thrust and fan thrust combine to provide a complete thrust package.

Since this is a car enthusiast website, you’re probably at least passingly familiar with how piston engines operate – tiny explosions push pistons to convert up-down energy to rotation energy – so let’s focus on the important point that piston engine power figures measure shaft power. The conversion process to find what a jet engine’s shaft power would be is surprisingly simple. Multiply the jet’s thrust, which is pounds-force (lbf), by the airspeed of the aircraft. You can either break out your TI-86 from college or go to the Calculator Academy website’s Thrust to Horsepower calculator.

The current most powerful jet engine in the world, GE Aerospace’s GE9X, can produce 134,300 lbf. This is the engine that will be used in Boeing’s 777X, which will reach an estimated top speed of 652 mph. Since the 777X uses two GE9X engines, we’ll put 268,600 lbf in for thrust. Multiply 268,600 by 652, and we get an astounding 467,006 hp, or about 467 Bugatti Veyrons, plus or minus a lawnmower.

Since the Boeing 777X isn’t technically an airliner you can fly on yet, let’s do the horsepower calculation for the current Boeing 777. The 777 can top out at 683 mph and uses a pair of GE’s GE90-115B turbofan engines, which produce 115,000 lbf each. That still comes out to a healthy 418,907 hp. For metric system fans, that’s 312 Megawatts.

If you want larger numbers, you don’t have to stick with horses. AnimalHorsePower.com has a comparison tool where you can convert the pulling power of horses to dozens of other animals. Interestingly, the tool says that a horse can put out about 28 horsepower max, which is only slightly more than what biologists R.J. Wassersug and R.D. Stevenson estimated in 1993, which was about 24 horsepower.

Sticking with that 28 hp figure, the horsepower converter tool estimates a chimpanzee has the same peak output as 0.03 horses, or a max of 0.87 hp. So, in a sentence that surely hasn’t been written before, the Boeing 777 has 481,502 chimp power (cp?), which equates to 359 megawatts. There’s no way you woke up this morning thinking you’d have the tools to directly convert the strength of chimps to megawatts, and yet, here you are. Think about that on your next commercial flight.