alt Hacker NewsWhy jet engines aren't made in China
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> It may be surprising, then, that in jet engines, China remains at least a full decade behind the West
Do they need to be at the same level as the West?
For civilian aircraft a decade or two behind seems like it would be good enough.
For military aircraft that could be a significant disadvantage, but from what the net is telling me they have excellent air defenses so it seems unlikely someone with superior planes is going to be able to go in and bomb them into submission. And they have a lot of nuclear missiles to further discourage anyone from trying.
I work in the aviation industry. This was a good read. The article hinted at the oligopolies that exist in aviation and in practice the industry is incredibly conservative and slow to change (particularly commercial aviation). While new technology is developed all the time, the extreme regulatory oversight combined with so much of the industry relying on long-standing relationships makes it difficult for any new entrant to come into the market. There is also a lot of domain specific knowledge that seems difficult to easily transfer.
Assuming China has spent 50 years already on jet engines, yeah. All these article just write off China.
Rote learning, no democracy. Proper jet engines WILL come out of China soon. lol. Just watch this space.
This is a strange article. I did not find anything that is a blocker for China. China is a relative new comer to jet engines and this technology is tightly guarded by incumbents and needs time to mature.
If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.
this interview also talked a bit about the reasons its hard for get turbines to be manufactured in China, but coming at it from the gas power generation side. https://www.decouple.media/p/the-gas-turbine-the-final-revel...
While I think the scale of American decline is overstated, I think there is a degree of Hemingway's law of motion.
A desired task that requires the most skilled makes those skilled people in demand. If a power has significantly more resources then they have more to offer those most skilled people.
It isn't at all disputed that there are a huge number of scientific discoveries that have occurred in The USA by people born outside the USA. That shows the draw of that power, but it is a relative draw. As the ratio becomes smaller the draw is less.
Advances like this are a feedback mechanism, being ahead gives you more resources to stay ahead.
If you consider the average contribution of advances to be a relatively steady force advancing a nation, yet a nation is in decline, it stands to reason that the decline is in another area and is being mitigated by the advances.
If the force propping things up goes somewhere else the change can be quite swift because the force of the decline becomes suddenly much more apparent.
I don't see the world going full Mad Max, but I can certainly see a sudden shift to the USA being considered no different to the UK,Japan, or Germany.
meta: isn't there a long history of such retrospective analysis where when a country does well economically, it's due to something in their culture?
This is also why China has heavily invested in high-speed rail. Even today, many people who are influenced by persistent misinformation and years of criticism toward China continue to question its high-speed rail system, asking why China doesn’t follow the U.S. model of relying on cars and airplanes instead. But China’s limited ability to rapidly scale commercial aviation means it would have to purchase large numbers of aircraft at high prices to meet domestic passenger demand, while also keeping ticket prices low. That is fundamentally not feasible. In this sense, high-speed rail is China’s only viable solution. Even though many lines are not profitable on a strict accounting basis, the enormous social and systemic benefits make the investment worthwhile.
This is somewhat similar to the camera industry. It is a shrinking market, while iterative improvements in smartphone cameras are where the real economic returns are. This is why the traditional camera industry remains dominated by Japan, while China has gradually captured adjacent markets such as smartphones and products like DJI. Of course, the barriers to entry in traditional cameras are not as deep.
As the article suggests, China is mainly “late” in certain areas. The industries are not always large, the profit pools are limited, and compliance requirements can be cumbersome. In this sense, the Chinese government does not seem to have made any major strategic mistake here. The current pattern of catching up and lagging behind is largely predictable. Unlike in high-end semiconductors, I do think China has made significant mistakes here. In state-led industrial programs of this kind, a lack of market discipline and episodes of corruption scandals have repeatedly slowed progress and led the government to become more cautious. However, given that China already holds a dominant position in mid-to-low-end semiconductors, the overall outlook may still be optimistic.
Since it is currently World Cup season, Chinese football is another example of a similar structural issue. The system is simply deeply broken and incapable of properly identifying and cultivating top talent.
> And jet engines do not have any lower-tier market with underserved demand
They actually do. The segment of small jet-powered (military) drones is rapidly growing and isn't served by the big jet engine manufacturers.
You can read about China's modern carrier-based, stealth fighter here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35
There is a section about its engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35#Engines
The first engine they used for the J-35 was the RD-33 (designed/built in Russia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_RD-33#RD-93 - It was not efficient enough for the J-35 and generated black smoke trails. China decided to design & build a China-based engine.
This is the engine for the early J-35 prototype, WS-13 built in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-13
This is the production engine for J-35, the WS-19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-19
China has built 50+ J-35 aircraft, and is scaling up production to support their domestic military, and also export orders to other militaries (including Pakistan, and possibly Russia).
Interesting: This is China's latest aircraft carrier, which has electromagnetic catapults, instead of steam-based: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Fujia...
You can see videos of the J-35 aircraft here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdCNAUjuRI
There is a lot of black art stuff in jet engine manufacturing, but if this article is supposed to be reassuring to Americans, it's not to me. They're saying that China was 21 years behind on the previous generation of engines, and they're going to be 7 years behind on the next one. That sounds like they're catching up pretty fast.
I don't know where they're at in terms of civil engines, but each new generation of engines eeks out less and less additional performance. If China comes out with something like the CFM LEAP at a good price, I'd imagine they could sell that for many years to come.
Jet engines are far more high-tech than most people imagine, but I'm not convinced this is evidence of some inherent Chinese weakness. The obvious explanation is that China started much later in an insanely difficult field.
They are narrowing a gap measured in decades. The article explains the difficulty well, but it doesn't convince me that China can't eventually (again, given enough time) build good engines, especially for domestic military use.
Same for semi-conductors, IMHO.
For as long as the article is, surprised that it neglected to mention that the WS-10 started as an unlicensed copy of the CFM-56.
Cherry-picking individual technologies (such as jet engines) doesn't really say much. You could argue that companies like ASML and Rolls-Royce (jet engines) are evidence that Europe knows how to innovate and the US doesn't. That Airbus overtaking Boeing in a market once completely dominated by Boeing shows the US has lost its edge. That the European-designed ARM architecture winning the mobile phone wars shows the US has lost its chip design advantage. And so on.
But there are obvious counterarguments if you cherry-pick technologies where the US currently leads — Google Search, AI, and so on.
So I would be really careful extracting any kind of simple "truth" from examples like these. Different countries have different advantages, and those advantages shift over time. That's it.
There are 200 Chinese industrial engineers, 8 Chinese bankers, and 1 Goldman Sachs disciple of Hank Paulson, reading this right now thinking of ways to chip away at sentence in this paper.
the one thing that this article leaves out is very obvious and simple: culture
when you don't have an environment where truthful valid opinions or facts are allowed to freely be tested and communicated you simply can't build anything complex that requires strong individual integrity and honesty.
jets aren't the only stuff that China cannot make. Semiconductors are also a great example.
> A failure in these blades would be catastrophic, resulting in the destruction of the engine, likely followed by the plane itself.
Aaaaand the author just lost any credibility with me whatsoever. This is someone who knows big words, maybe did some research and ChatGPTing, and doesn't actually know shit about aircraft or their engines.
On passenger aircraft because passengers sit directly inline with the path a blade with insane levels of kinetic energy will probably go, the nacelle is designed to contain it.
The engine must be able to contain a "blade off" event where a blade snaps during full rated thrust. Two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j973645y5AA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcALjMJbAvU
The aircraft will not be "destroyed."
The blade could fail during takeoff climb and the plane would still be able to climb because all twin engine passenger jet aircraft must be able to conduct all phases of flight on one engine.
SWA 1380 had a passenger fatality not because of the blade hitting them, but because part of the cowling disintegrated, broke the window, and she was partially sucked out of the aircraft, which killed her.
If she'd been wearing her seatbelt, she would likely be alive today. As would several other passengers who, over the years, have been killed by debris breaking the window and them being sucked out.
The blade itself did not leave the engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380
That article lists a number of incidents, in roughly half of which the blade was contained. All the flights made it back to an airport...
wow, this was a fantastic, fascinating read
A lot of claims in the article.
IDK if the WS-15 failed or is "two decades" behind. I think we just don't know, but we do know that it is that they have achieved the ability to deliver, in mass, third-generation single-crystal nickel-based superalloys. That's a strong proof point.
As for commercial, China can/has grant a sizable portion of the C919 to domestic engine producers ( I think AECC has this contract ) that allows for a lot of capital and practice.
I would not be shocked if China demonstrates highly competitive engines in the late 2020, maybe with a few setbacks and iterations. I would also not be shocked if they started demonstrating engines with some characteristics slightly better than the Western manufactures in that time period (or maybe a little later).
the structural disadvantages that the article points to, long iteration times, weird inside baseball materials science and tacit knowledge in manufacturing are real but the author is wrong to dismiss the scale.
Scale doesn't help them much in getting the engines up to quality but it does give them the ability to run dozens of experiments and companies at the same time. And they only need to have a handful of breakthroughs once.
That's a pattern that's already repeated it a few times, China has had trouble catching up in the car market for a long time, on semiconductors. On the first they're now on their way to capture the market, on chips they're catching up, and on military engines you can already see the gap closing. I predict the title of the post will age badly, within 5-10 years there'll be competitive commercial planes in China.
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The more parsimonious explanation is that commercial jet engine production is downstream of commercial airbody production and China's currently limited by COMAC's scaling woes. All the money and talent in the world can't replicate real users generating real data that you can use to improve.
I'd argue the opposite that jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies. There's a few industries where structurally, companies can only exit the market but it's almost impossible for a new company to enter. Airframes, jet engines, CPU manufacturing, lithography etc.
What this dynamic doesn't make any company immune from though is corporate rot. You've seen the rot take down Boeing and Intel from the inside as a slow moving car wreck. There's no reason the rot can't take down ASML, TSMC or Airbus as well. The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem, excess capital is taken out of these companies during good times and then they run to governments seeking bailouts during bad times but governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.
I think a lot of the jet engine manufacturers are seeing this same corporate rot process, the number of high profile scandals across the industry and reports of insiders on how the number crunchers are taking over the business are strangely reminiscent of what we heard out of Boeing and Intel.