Safran Aircraft Engines
aircraft and rocket engine manufacturer based in France
Safran Aircraft Engines, previously Snecma (Société nationale d'études et de construction de moteurs d'aviation) or Snecma Moteurs, is a French aerospace engine manufacturer headquartered in Courcouronnes and a subsidiary of Safran. It designs, manufactures and maintains engines for commercial and military aircraft as well as rocket engines for launch vehicles and satellites.
Some of its notable developments, alone or in partnership, include the Dassault Rafale's M88 engine, the Concorde's Olympus 593, the CFM56 and CFM-LEAP for single-aisle airliners, as well as the Ariane 5's Vulcain engine.
The company employs around 15,700 people across 35 production sites, offices, and MRO facilities worldwide and files an average of nearly 500 patents each year.
Safran Aircraft Engines also notably operates two joint ventures with GE Aerospace: CFM International, the world's leading supplier of commercial aircraft engines, and CFM Materials.
Timeline
1945: Snecma was formed when the French aircraft engine manufacturer Gnome & Rhône was nationalised. The name 'Snecma' was an acronym for Société nationale d'études et de construction de moteurs d'aviation (in English: 'National Company for the Research and Construction of Aviation Engines').
1946: Initial employees were German engineers, primarily from BMW, located in Decize, France. Group was known as Groupe "O" until 1950. First design product was the ATAR engine.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Safran Aircraft Engines” is aircraft and rocket engine manufacturer based in France. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Safran, Aircraft and Engines, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q773875. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1946 and 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Safran Aircraft Engines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.