The world’s biggest aerospace and defense enterprise has chosen its next chief executive officer. To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention, it is Christopher T. Calio, 50, the company’s current president and chief operating officer.
Calio will assume his new role on May 2 at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, and is immediately joining the RTX board of directors. Current CEO and chairman Greg Hayes, 63, will continue to serve after May 2 as the company’s executive chairman. RTX is a longtime contributor to my think tank.
In recent years, several major A&D companies have gone outside the ranks of senior executives to find their next CEO. For instance, Boeing
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RTX is doing the precise opposite. Chris Calio has been a company insider since 2005, when he joined the heritage United Technologies
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It is not uncommon for military and commercial aircraft to be equipped with RTX engines, flight controls, landing gear, power units and a host of other company products. RTX technology spans the military and commercial marketplace from manufacturing to services, domestically and internationally.
It recently secured responsibility to upgrade the engines it supplies on an exclusive basis for the F-35 fighter, destined to become the world’s most ubiquitous tactical aircraft. It also is providing geared turbofan engines for a number of commercial aircraft, using an internally-developed design that is intrinsically more efficient than conventional turbofans.
Calio has played a central role in the emergence of RTX as an A&D powerhouse, having served as president of the Pratt & Whitney engine unit before being promoted in 2022 to chief operating officer of the whole enterprise.
In the latter position, he reorganized operations into three segments—Pratt, Collins and Raytheon—which he now oversees. He also manages the company’s technology development, engineering, enterprise services and supply chain.
In other words, Chris Calio understands the full range of RTX activities in greater detail than any other executive except for CEO Hayes himself. I interviewed Calio last year for a Forbes piece; he comes across as thoughtful, focused and self-effacing.
His most immediate challenge as CEO will be getting the geared turbofan through the kind of rough patch that breakthrough technologies often encounter. That will take some time, but the geared approach to jet propulsion eventually will own the market, because it optimizes the speeds at which spinning parts operate—a fuel-saving efficiency that other turbofans can’t match.
RTX’s press release disclosing Calio’s promotion emphasized that this is just the latest step in a carefully planned succession process as Greg Hayes approaches retirement age. Hayes, who gets credit for creating the world’s leading A&D enterprise, still has years to run at the company, but he is sending Wall Street a reassuring message about what the future holds for RTX.
The days of big mergers and divestitures, realignments and reorganizations, are over. RTX is now better positioned than any other A&D company in the world. It is the global leader in many of the business lines in which it plays, and looks likely to increase the range of technologies in which that is the case.
This is one time when government customers and regulators should be as comfortable with what a key U.S. enterprise is doing as shareholders are. RTX is poised to outperform for the foreseeable future, and Chris Calio is an ideal choice to keep the juggernaut moving forward.
Disclosure: As noted above, RTX contributes to my think tank, the Lexington Institute.
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