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.
I even thought that the example of automobiles proved the jet engine analogy wrong.
Sure, automobiles aren’t as complex as a jet engine, but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.
Something like 10 years ago we were laughing at videos of Chinese cars spectacularly failing crash tests, and now China is selling to very heavily regulated markets.
Year the article very much ignores that Geely actually can produce a competent modern combustion engine. Their latest model for use in hybrid drivetrains broke the record for thermal efficiency in a consumer combustion engine.
It also treats EV motors as "commodity brushless motors" completely glossing over the actual engineering behind modern EV motors.
Twenty five years ago a Chinese supercomputer was laughable. Today they build them. Ten years ago Chinese cars were laughable, now they're sold worldwide. Ten years ago people laughed at the "metro to nowhere," now it's the core of a new central business district.
The fact that domestic Chinese engines have entered military service, to me, is a pretty strong indicator that given another decade or two, they'll be building some of the most competitive jet engines on earth.
Material engineering is the well known blocker for China, same with semiconductors. They basically have to replicate 50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west.
China hasn’t mastered chips either yet in the same way it hasn’t mastered jet turbines: they can do cheap (high yields, low maintenance costs per hour of use), they can do high performance, they can’t do both yet at the same time.
It seems the author started from a desiserd conclusion, and strung together fact(oid)s to support it without any understanding of them, sometimes making huge mistakes.
For example the monocrystalline blades, which are touted as some holy grain, were in production engines on both sides of the iron curtain by the 70s. China has mastered this technology by the 2010s at the latest.
As for airliner engines, I looked up both the LEAP and the PW1000 and their 'hot' part - the turbines - have fairly conservative specs, roughly on par with these aforementioned 70s US/Soviet fighter engines. This is the technology tha's more or less shared between military and civilian engines.
The big Western advantage comes from manufacturing the bypass fan - the composite blades and the high-speed gearbox connecting them to the jet 'core' are technologies that the West has a huge lead on and that's why the reason comparable Russian and Chinese engines don't exist.
But strictly speaking, that's not really directly related to the tech in the turbine 'cores' which most people refer to when speaking about jets and not a peep is made about this in the article.
Can you please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines? You broke quite a few of them with this post.
You're welcome to express your views thoughtfully, but not aggressively. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
If there was ever a sector where the Chinese ability to cost effectively churn out good enough then drone applications are it.
Getting a handle on how nations are doing for jet powered drone is a bit tricky because of limited data available for what is primarily a military application. But, if we take model aircraft applications as proxy, then my understanding is that the Chinese company Swiwin (est. 2013) is already undercutting everyone else.
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.
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.
≥jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies.
A lot of the theoretical concepts behind this... They need updating to account for the last generation of experience. For the most part, the concepts were developed in the context of the industrial revolution(s) and manufacturing.
We are talking about manufacturing here, but the US economy in the last generation is a story about software, services, non-manufacturing firms and manufacturing firms the side step (as best they can) the core paradigm of manufacturing economics.
Competitive pricing, substitutes and alternatives, a strategic paradigm governed by market prices, marginal costs, and manufacturing quality... This is relatively marginal paradigm in the US economy, certainly in terms of market cap. In china, it is their bread and butter.
Low margin, highly competitive components manufacturing... Is that really a forte a free market societies in 2026?
I agree about "corporate rot." I don't think anyone has a good answer to this. China included. In practice, the best solution appears to be young vibrant companies. VW or Ford vs Tesla & BYD. VW and Ford exist because of history. Tesla & BYD exist because they perform well.
Schumpeter's free market solution was creative destruction... But, we've never really had a system for promoting this.
Part of the problem is that in a global market, allowing a company to fail... Clears up the room in the market, but there's no guarantee that your country will fill it. If Germany had come down hard on VW after the turbo diesel scandal... They probably would have just ceded market share to Korea or China or the US or something.
> 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.
And there's the opening for China. The 90s and early 2000s saw alot of innovation by engine manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus built their planes around the next generation of engines coming out. But over the past 10 or so years all the major engine manufacturers decided to stop investing in new civilian engines and maximize their dividends on existing models. That's what killed the A380--the A380 engines are 90's tech, and all the engine manufacturers declined to build a new engine for an upgraded A380, not even one that utilized the current tech, and not even if Airbus backstopped potential losses.
So now is probably the best time since the 1980s for China to play catch-up. But the biggest problem is as you pointed out--engines and airframes are developed together, and both Airbus and Boeing also decided to stop new aircraft development and instead coast and reap dividends for the next decade or two, so there's no market for China to break into. There's still development happening in the defense space, but that's not a market open to China, either. Their only potential market is primarily domestic, and it's not capable of incentivizing and demanding dogged innovation in the same way the international market could.
Yes and no. Had there been more demand it would still be around, of course. But one of the reasons (albeit a lesser reason) there wasn't much demand was because of the antiquated engine tech. The poor A380 fuel efficiency competitiveness had less to do with it having 4 engines than that those engines were 1990s tech (same generation as on the 777, despite the first delivery of the A380 being more than 10 years after the 777). The 787 and A350 were favored by the industry not only because of point-to-point, but because their engines had far better fuel efficiency. (Even at the same generation, the 2-engined aircraft would have slightly better fuel efficiency, but maintenance and overall operational cost is significantly higher because of the power envelop and reliability margins required, keeping the 4-engined A380 cost competitive in an even matchup of engine tech.)
Both Airbus and Emirates were willing to keep the A380 alive. Emirates was making money on it, and Airbus believed the market would eventually turn as airports reached takeoff/landing capacity. But Emirates wanted upgraded engines, so for several years there were negotiations between Emirates & Airbus on the one hand, and the big 3 engine makers on the other. IIRC, circa 2018 Emirates & Airbus were very close to a binding agreement with Rolls-Royce for an upgraded engine, but then Rolls-Royce faced costly issues with its existing programs. At the same time, prospective investment in the engine industry had already started winding down, and Rolls-Royce didn't want to be spending cash on a new program while GE and Pratt & Whitney passing through profits to shareholders. So in 2019 Rolls-Royce walked away, and shortly thereafter (weeks if not days), Airbus and Emirates agreed to terminate the A380.
Modern high bypass jet engines are already pretty close to maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency, given realistic constraints such as weight, wing clearance, noise, and so on.
Even if all constraints were relaxed, the absolute limit might be another halving of fuel consumption. (with trillions of R&D)
And beyond that, there literally can never be jet engines significantly more efficient, until the end of the universe.
And for short flights, battery electric or hybrid power could boost efficiency even further. Although that will depend on developing batteries with better safety and power density characteristics.
> governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.
The correct answer to this is to break up consolidated markets with antitrust. Are there only two airframe manufacturers left? Then chop them into smaller pieces so there are more. Reduce vertical integration so that it gets easier for new entrants to compete at any given part of the supply chain without needing to duplicate the entire thing themselves. Let each of the spin offs start with a non-exclusive license to the no longer existent parent company's technology so they all have the chance to iterate on it and compete for providing it.
Problem with antitrust hammers is that once you've chopped Boeing into bits you don't end up with a competitive market with lots of new aircraft designs, you end up with a global Airbus monopoly on aircraft over 150 seats and the few surviving bits of Boeing competing to sell into its supply chain...
Airframers really aren't that vertically integrated as companies go. But it turns out the business of designing, certifying and selling an aircraft (and managing complex multinational supply chains) is hard, and airlines don't want 6 competing types of narrowbody in their fleet, they want one type of narrowbody in their fleet with an abundance of type-rated pilots, multiple maintenance options and a robust aftermarket.
> airlines don't want 6 competing types of narrowbody in their fleet, they want one type of narrowbody in their fleet with an abundance of type-rated pilots, multiple maintenance options and a robust aftermarket.
Which is in itself a regulatory problem. Why is the government certifying only a specific company's design, granting them a lock on the market for everything to do with it?
Certifications should work in one of two ways. Either the industry comes together to submit a royalty-free design IETF style and then anybody can make it, or they certify a specific company's patented design and that company is prohibited from making it themselves and can only license it in exchange for a fixed fee per-plane, no license restrictions other than the payment of the fee, and a requirement to publish the uniform fee and charge the same amount to all producers. Then you get a company that designs planes but a competitive market for producing and maintaining them.
Notice also that the traditional 737, 757 and 777 are all over 20 years old, which is the term of a patent. In the absence of some chicanery that means they should all correspondingly be available for anyone to produce by now or design variants of which share parts and should only need partial rather than full recertification.
There is no reason it needs to work the way it does other than regulatory capture.
What a silly idea. Design and manufacturing of something as complex as an airliner is inextricably coupled. There's no way for one company to design the whole aircraft and then just hand it off to others. We're not talking about toasters here.
> There's no way for one company to design the whole aircraft and then just hand it off to others.
This is exactly what they do anyway whenever they subcontract any part of the production. You don't need a single company that makes the entire plane and don't even have that now. You can have companies that make engines, other companies that make the passenger seats, other companies that make the fuselage, other companies that do final assembly, etc.
There is nothing stopping the designer from talking to the manufacturing companies while creating the design. They could even be one of the manufacturing companies, they would just have to spin off the design licensing company into an independent entity at the point the design is certified.
Considering the design and certification is the expensive bit that needs thousands of sales to break even (want certification to be cheaper? Well I guess if you like more crashes) I'm not sure what some artificial separation of design and systems integration achieves, except perhaps worse safety as suddenly you've got a lot of companies selling the same licenced design manufactured by the same supply chain competing only on how many QC corners they can cut to reduce prices...
> Considering the design and certification is the expensive bit that needs thousands of sales to break even
What does that have to do with it? The design licensing entity is going to get a fee per-plane from every company doing final assembly. They're going to set the fee high enough to cover their costs but not so high that people go to Airbus instead.
> the illusion of a competitive market
How about an actually competitive market, because anyone can get the design on the same terms and can't use an exclusive right to foreclose competition in parts of the supply chain other than the one which is supposed to be under patent.
> competing only on how many QC corners they can cut to reduce prices...
As opposed to the monopolist whose customers can't even switch to a competitor when one supplier has a safety scandal, yet operates under the same profit incentive to cut costs?
> What does that have to do with it? The design licensing entity is going to get a fee per-plane from every company doing final assembly. They're going to set the fee high enough to cover their costs but not so high that people go to a different design from another company instead.
It means that there's no incentive to be a "design licensing entity" that takes on all the cost and risk of designing, prototyping certifying an airframe and then shares the returns on making that airframe with a bunch of competitors that take on no such risk. Either the royalties are set very high in which case you're creating massive chaos for no meaningful price reduction, or you've made new aircraft development in the United States commercially unviable and accidentally given Airbus a global monopoly on 150+ seat airliners...
> How about an actually competitive market, because anyone can get the design on the same terms and can't use an exclusive right to foreclose competition in parts of the supply chain other than the one which is supposed to be under patent.
It's the illusion of market competition because the only way a company licenses IP it spends billion dollars a year updating and testing so that other manufacturers can undercut it on sales is if the government steps in and sets the price and decides who should and shouldn't be licensed 787 integrators (otherwise the answers are "too high for anyone to get involved" and "no, you guys that didn't coinvest in its development can't have licenses to sell anything more valuable than PMA parts"). And in practice not only do you get the government determining who is allowed to build 787s at what price, but also needing to underwrite the development costs, since "invest several billion in complex technology innovation; government will then determine the royalties you are entitled to earn from it" is not really an attractive proposition
> As opposed to the monopolist whose customers can't even switch to a competitor when the supplier has a safety scandal, yet operates under the same profit incentive to cut costs?
Yes, monopolists care more about maintaining the reputation of technology they've spent billions designing than random new market entrants established to manufacture others' IP more cheaply than them. Funnily enough subcontractors with little stake in the 737 specifically and the resulting diffusion of responsibility was the cause of the emergency door defects, and they're not going to do anything to solve MCAS either...
The simplest explanation is surely that China is new to having a highly educated workforce and the ‘failed for some fifty years’ claims the article makes don't mean much given it.
I don't think you need to entrain market arguments or whatnot to this, when it's only in the last decade China was a strong advanced manufacture player, and turbines are the kind of project that you probably wouldn't expect to go much faster than that regardless of the demand.
Exactly. Advanced turbine manufacturing is largely a chemistry and metallurgy problem. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killed off China's intellectual capital so they had to start from scratch in 1976, and only really got moving in 1992. They've been way behind but will catch up eventually.
Because repression is a thing of the past in China? They continue to persecute investors and business executives who get too successful and to repress academic work they find politically objectionable. The communist party continues to exercise control over all intellectual endeavors.
And don't think it doesn't matter for jet engines. This article gets into how the open acknowledgment and dissection of engine failure in the West promotes quality and that China has clearly not adopted this culture. Of course not.
They'll catch up in the same way the Soviet Union used to - at unsustainable cost and on the way to falling behind yet again.
Persecuting or favoring investors on a political basis "and to repress academic work they find politically objectionable" has come to America. The only business people intellectually weak enough to not be a threat are real estate developers.
Not that the tech industry leaders who are way too comfortable with fascism are making such a good showing either.
So you think it’s just as bad as China here? Please state plainly instead of dodging around. Would you just as soon live there, have made your career there? You think you’d be able to publish your books and prosper there? You think we are fascist and so… your life will be miserable now?
Plainly, you’d much rather live here than there, and your equivalence is totally false. It’s a dictatorial repressive regime and much worse than here and you know it, and your comment is a corrosive disingenuous false equivalence.
It’s really a bizarre statement, a sort of narcissistic need to feel persecuted amidst a life of plenty in the wealthiest society ever known. They have forced sterilization of Muslim women in China, up until recently forced abortions under the one child rule, and you get disappeared for criticizing dear leader. And your cozy life is comparably miserable? Only in your mind.
According to the article, the skills gained from decades of manufacturing experience and the yield capabilities are more critical than simple chemistry and metallurgy.
Quick question. Same issue in Japan. They have talents and capital -- why do you think they are not able to come up with a reliable turbine -- when they can manufacture almost everything else?
Economics. Japan has chosen to specialize in other areas and being a jet turbine engine manufacturer isn't where they've chosen to put resources in. The pay off simply isn't there. They're there in the supply chain, with IHI, MItsubishi, and Kawasaki being in the business of advanced titanium and nickel superalloys being used in wind, steam, and gas turbines for powerplants. It's just that the economics of commercial jet engines themselves isn't something they've chosen to pursue.
I'd expect the competition for these companies to come in not from someone using the same technology, but a different technology that serves the same purpose. Eg. what happened to Kodak and Nokia.
For jet engines, the only thing that comes to mind is electric aircraft. No single-crystal turbine blades needed at all.
I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands.
The problem with fully electric airliners is physics: to achieve useful range you either need batteries with energy density that seems unfeasible or some sort of power beaming infrastructure which has its own set of enormous challenges. So if Western turbofan manufacturers' moat lasts until electric aviation is ubiquitous, they can be very, very happy.
(Now sure, you can substitute electric aircraft with open rotor jet engines which require different institutional knowledge to modern high bypass turbofans, but they're still really sensitive to how the blades are manufactured)
> I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands.
I know electric aircraft are not quite feasible on the same scale as airlines.
On the other hand, China has an extensive high-speed rail network for inland travel. OI have no idea how often the Chine fly inside the country vs how often they use aircraft, but this is the sort of different technology for the same purpose I mean.
Serious electric aircraft are really gated behind major advancements in battery technology or some alternative power storage tech. The energy density of batteries is an order of magnitude less than fossil fuels, and you have to carry the heavy batteries with you the entire trip (vs burning off fuel as you fly).
"The energy density of batteries is an order of magnitude less than fossil fuels, and you have to carry the heavy batteries with you the entire trip (vs burning off fuel as you fly)."
It's even worse. Nowadays, in order to land, the aircraft needs to be almost empty, otherwise the mechanical structure that supports the stress of impact with the runway may break. So, heavier (as with batteries included) aircraft landing will mean the need to design sturdier landing gear, and stronger landing gear will most likely mean heavier materials as well.
"For jet engines, the only thing that comes to mind is electric aircraft. No single-crystal turbine blades needed at all. I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands."
I understand the idea you wanted to convey and that commenting on the technical detail is not something we're supposed to do, but the technical side of your example is just too glaring to ignore. A people-carrying aircraft, be it of electric propulsion, or of other type, is heavy. Like, several tons (at minimum) heavy. To acquire the necessary portance, the aircraft has to be accelerated (on its inert wheels) on the runway up to the take-off speed and then to be able to hold the cruising speed, using engines capable of generating such thrust by only moving the air. That's a lot of force right there, and the engine that has to do this, will have to be pretty tough. Regardless of the fact that the source of the on-board energy is electric or not, that same air will have to be moved, somehow, at the needed speeds, and it will be by an engine that will look and work pretty much the same way the current jet engines do, since the shape is dictated by the aerodynamics and the internal design is given by the (air) fluid dynamics it has to work with. The single-crystal turbine blades are just an optimization. Weaker (regular fine-grained casting) materials can be used, but that will mean limiting the performance to lower tolerance levels (and most likely be heavier as well, to compensate for the lower mechanical strength).
Boom Supersonic is entering the turbine engine market using private funding (they have received some limited government contracts and tax incentives). It seems like the free market is responding pretty well, although they still might fail.
That was my thought too. You can absolutely enter the industry, and big players do as the industry becomes profitable enough to sustain more competitors, it's just not available to the average person in the same way the average person can easily compete in the todo app industry.
It's available to the average person if they're willing to put in the work necessary to attract investors. Blake Scholl was a regular engineer before he founded Boom Supersonic. He had made some money on previous jobs but wasn't super wealthy or connected.
> 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
This isn't a free market problem. Companies move money out to avoid corporation tax, and government bailouts are what stop the free market from operating as it should.
As an engineer in semiconductors in the Netherlands, I hear from a lot of my friends working at ASML the typical red flags of the rot. They have a very thick middle management layer. Nobody feels like they are working at a high tech company with cutting edge solutions. I believe the customer support roles are very dynamic and satisfying.
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.
High speed rail in China is a disaster. Basic safety failings have led to repeated crashes and deaths. Confiscation of property on a massive scale has damaged government credibility. Trillions of dollars worth of investment is not paying off while depreciation does it's work. Prices have been cranked up, large numbers of workers have been fired, and the whole system is still deep in the red. The only solid good coming from Chinese high speed rail is the demonstration of how much damage out of control dictators can do to the bottom line.
This delulu take. PRC HSR only had 1 disaster WenZhou, after which they shaped up and is functionally as safe as Japan, i.e. best in the world, more than euro operators, except on a magnitude larger network. Prices was kept flat literally for 10 years plus, after hike it is still far below inflation / wage increase. The whole system basically pays for itself in a few years on domestic fuel import savings alone, i.e. the aviation and freeing up slow rail from passenger to to freight which displaces diesel/trucking displaces like 1.5m barrels of oil PER DAY... ~50b+ per year in fuel cost alone never mind emissions avoided. It is objectively one of the highest ROI projects PRC has ever build, and stupendous bargain at 1T, which US overspends every 6 months on healthcare.
Like everyday US wastes on healthcare over OECD basline = enough $$$ for PRC to build like 300km of HSR, stations hardware and all. 1 week of US healthcare waste can build out entire Beijing to Shanghai route. Chinese HSR is best demonstration of why developmental dictatorship works.
> 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.
It's kinda opposite in a way. More countries make military engines than commercial engines because military engines don't have to worry as much about efficiency, pollution, sound, and most importantly cost.
But unless you massively subsidize a company "cough Rolls Royce cough" then you can't compete at all with a generation or two behind commercial jet engine tech.
> 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:
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.
This is not my understanding by reading the article. The blade failure will destroy the plane if developed independently of the rest. So modern nacelles will contain the blast as you say but they have decades of integration testing together with the blades in all kind of conditions.
if you develop everything anew there will be mismatches in tolerances and thousands of potential individual failure risks that can be combined in interesting, unexpected and fatal ways.
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.
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.
China has an incredible engineering culture. If you think their meteoric rise is accomplished without being able to share opinions or facts you’re very much mistaken.
To imply they lack “individual integrity and honesty” is misinformed, deluded, and likely racist.
Two weeks ago I took the high speed train to Shenzhen, which was better than any domestic flight in the US. Then I had a drone deliver an iced tea. I took a driverless taxi to get there. The roads were incredibly quiet and the air quality was excellent because almost all cars and motorcycles are electric. World’s first small modular reactor goes live in a few months. The Huawei Ascend GPUs aren’t at Nvidia level, but they’re still allowing the Chinese models to be within a few months of frontier labs, with the gap closing with every new model release. They have no EUV capabilities yet, but neither does the US because that comes from the Netherlands.
Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word racist. But in the same way that stupidity and evil look very similar, so do racism and ignorance.
you are just rambling with totally unrelated topics the article is about why china can't make jet engines.
im asking you a second time because you keep avoiding it: why can't china make jet engines and semiconductors if they have such great engineering culture and talent as you claim?
Russia has just finally declared achieving full "import substitution" for Superjet-100, a regional jet so badly needed in Russia and the first Russian plane to be produced in decades. With domestically sourced parts the plane is now several tons heavier, and with Russian jet engines it has range of only half of the original non-import-substituted plane, and that makes it borderline unusable as a regional jet for Russia.
"Technological sovereignty" sounds like something smart and glorious ... well, in the 6th grade history classes it was called "natural economy" of the feudalism.
China is 10x of Russia, and thus can build higher technological pyramid - the modern technology in my view is like a pyramid where the complexity of achievable technology at the top is defined by how broad is your foundation. The base of China's pyramid is growing by including more and more of its society into modern technological economy, yet it is still smaller than the Western world's pyramid. The original article exactly describes that the China's pyramid is still of not sufficient height/width for such a complex product like modern jet engine.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadIf China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.
Sure, automobiles aren’t as complex as a jet engine, but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.
Something like 10 years ago we were laughing at videos of Chinese cars spectacularly failing crash tests, and now China is selling to very heavily regulated markets.
Same deal with things like high speed rail.
It also treats EV motors as "commodity brushless motors" completely glossing over the actual engineering behind modern EV motors.
Twenty five years ago a Chinese supercomputer was laughable. Today they build them. Ten years ago Chinese cars were laughable, now they're sold worldwide. Ten years ago people laughed at the "metro to nowhere," now it's the core of a new central business district.
The fact that domestic Chinese engines have entered military service, to me, is a pretty strong indicator that given another decade or two, they'll be building some of the most competitive jet engines on earth.
China hasn’t mastered chips either yet in the same way it hasn’t mastered jet turbines: they can do cheap (high yields, low maintenance costs per hour of use), they can do high performance, they can’t do both yet at the same time.
For example the monocrystalline blades, which are touted as some holy grain, were in production engines on both sides of the iron curtain by the 70s. China has mastered this technology by the 2010s at the latest.
As for airliner engines, I looked up both the LEAP and the PW1000 and their 'hot' part - the turbines - have fairly conservative specs, roughly on par with these aforementioned 70s US/Soviet fighter engines. This is the technology tha's more or less shared between military and civilian engines.
The big Western advantage comes from manufacturing the bypass fan - the composite blades and the high-speed gearbox connecting them to the jet 'core' are technologies that the West has a huge lead on and that's why the reason comparable Russian and Chinese engines don't exist.
But strictly speaking, that's not really directly related to the tech in the turbine 'cores' which most people refer to when speaking about jets and not a peep is made about this in the article.
You're welcome to express your views thoughtfully, but not aggressively. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
They actually do. The segment of small jet-powered (military) drones is rapidly growing and isn't served by the big jet engine manufacturers.
Getting a handle on how nations are doing for jet powered drone is a bit tricky because of limited data available for what is primarily a military application. But, if we take model aircraft applications as proxy, then my understanding is that the Chinese company Swiwin (est. 2013) is already undercutting everyone else.
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.
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.
A lot of the theoretical concepts behind this... They need updating to account for the last generation of experience. For the most part, the concepts were developed in the context of the industrial revolution(s) and manufacturing.
We are talking about manufacturing here, but the US economy in the last generation is a story about software, services, non-manufacturing firms and manufacturing firms the side step (as best they can) the core paradigm of manufacturing economics.
Competitive pricing, substitutes and alternatives, a strategic paradigm governed by market prices, marginal costs, and manufacturing quality... This is relatively marginal paradigm in the US economy, certainly in terms of market cap. In china, it is their bread and butter.
Low margin, highly competitive components manufacturing... Is that really a forte a free market societies in 2026?
I agree about "corporate rot." I don't think anyone has a good answer to this. China included. In practice, the best solution appears to be young vibrant companies. VW or Ford vs Tesla & BYD. VW and Ford exist because of history. Tesla & BYD exist because they perform well.
Schumpeter's free market solution was creative destruction... But, we've never really had a system for promoting this.
Part of the problem is that in a global market, allowing a company to fail... Clears up the room in the market, but there's no guarantee that your country will fill it. If Germany had come down hard on VW after the turbo diesel scandal... They probably would have just ceded market share to Korea or China or the US or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa_50,000-ton_forging_press
(which has made parts for pretty much every U.S. produced jet aircraft since the '60s)
Interestingly, Tesla has invested in some largish presses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press
which makes for a large reduction in the quantity of parts (but also complicates repairs https://www.northwestautocollision.com/the-most-common-tesla...)
And there's the opening for China. The 90s and early 2000s saw alot of innovation by engine manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus built their planes around the next generation of engines coming out. But over the past 10 or so years all the major engine manufacturers decided to stop investing in new civilian engines and maximize their dividends on existing models. That's what killed the A380--the A380 engines are 90's tech, and all the engine manufacturers declined to build a new engine for an upgraded A380, not even one that utilized the current tech, and not even if Airbus backstopped potential losses.
So now is probably the best time since the 1980s for China to play catch-up. But the biggest problem is as you pointed out--engines and airframes are developed together, and both Airbus and Boeing also decided to stop new aircraft development and instead coast and reap dividends for the next decade or two, so there's no market for China to break into. There's still development happening in the defense space, but that's not a market open to China, either. Their only potential market is primarily domestic, and it's not capable of incentivizing and demanding dogged innovation in the same way the international market could.
In addition even if had been engine-centric there is no way there was enough market to dedicate R&D for a new engine for this limited market.
Both Airbus and Emirates were willing to keep the A380 alive. Emirates was making money on it, and Airbus believed the market would eventually turn as airports reached takeoff/landing capacity. But Emirates wanted upgraded engines, so for several years there were negotiations between Emirates & Airbus on the one hand, and the big 3 engine makers on the other. IIRC, circa 2018 Emirates & Airbus were very close to a binding agreement with Rolls-Royce for an upgraded engine, but then Rolls-Royce faced costly issues with its existing programs. At the same time, prospective investment in the engine industry had already started winding down, and Rolls-Royce didn't want to be spending cash on a new program while GE and Pratt & Whitney passing through profits to shareholders. So in 2019 Rolls-Royce walked away, and shortly thereafter (weeks if not days), Airbus and Emirates agreed to terminate the A380.
It's difficult to find non-paywalled sources, but see, e.g., https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2018/10/16/is-...
Even if all constraints were relaxed, the absolute limit might be another halving of fuel consumption. (with trillions of R&D)
And beyond that, there literally can never be jet engines significantly more efficient, until the end of the universe.
https://www.geaerospace.com/news/articles/shape-things-come-...
And for short flights, battery electric or hybrid power could boost efficiency even further. Although that will depend on developing batteries with better safety and power density characteristics.
The correct answer to this is to break up consolidated markets with antitrust. Are there only two airframe manufacturers left? Then chop them into smaller pieces so there are more. Reduce vertical integration so that it gets easier for new entrants to compete at any given part of the supply chain without needing to duplicate the entire thing themselves. Let each of the spin offs start with a non-exclusive license to the no longer existent parent company's technology so they all have the chance to iterate on it and compete for providing it.
And don't let them buy each other again.
Airframers really aren't that vertically integrated as companies go. But it turns out the business of designing, certifying and selling an aircraft (and managing complex multinational supply chains) is hard, and airlines don't want 6 competing types of narrowbody in their fleet, they want one type of narrowbody in their fleet with an abundance of type-rated pilots, multiple maintenance options and a robust aftermarket.
Which is in itself a regulatory problem. Why is the government certifying only a specific company's design, granting them a lock on the market for everything to do with it?
Certifications should work in one of two ways. Either the industry comes together to submit a royalty-free design IETF style and then anybody can make it, or they certify a specific company's patented design and that company is prohibited from making it themselves and can only license it in exchange for a fixed fee per-plane, no license restrictions other than the payment of the fee, and a requirement to publish the uniform fee and charge the same amount to all producers. Then you get a company that designs planes but a competitive market for producing and maintaining them.
Notice also that the traditional 737, 757 and 777 are all over 20 years old, which is the term of a patent. In the absence of some chicanery that means they should all correspondingly be available for anyone to produce by now or design variants of which share parts and should only need partial rather than full recertification.
There is no reason it needs to work the way it does other than regulatory capture.
This is exactly what they do anyway whenever they subcontract any part of the production. You don't need a single company that makes the entire plane and don't even have that now. You can have companies that make engines, other companies that make the passenger seats, other companies that make the fuselage, other companies that do final assembly, etc.
There is nothing stopping the designer from talking to the manufacturing companies while creating the design. They could even be one of the manufacturing companies, they would just have to spin off the design licensing company into an independent entity at the point the design is certified.
What does that have to do with it? The design licensing entity is going to get a fee per-plane from every company doing final assembly. They're going to set the fee high enough to cover their costs but not so high that people go to Airbus instead.
> the illusion of a competitive market
How about an actually competitive market, because anyone can get the design on the same terms and can't use an exclusive right to foreclose competition in parts of the supply chain other than the one which is supposed to be under patent.
> competing only on how many QC corners they can cut to reduce prices...
As opposed to the monopolist whose customers can't even switch to a competitor when one supplier has a safety scandal, yet operates under the same profit incentive to cut costs?
It means that there's no incentive to be a "design licensing entity" that takes on all the cost and risk of designing, prototyping certifying an airframe and then shares the returns on making that airframe with a bunch of competitors that take on no such risk. Either the royalties are set very high in which case you're creating massive chaos for no meaningful price reduction, or you've made new aircraft development in the United States commercially unviable and accidentally given Airbus a global monopoly on 150+ seat airliners...
> How about an actually competitive market, because anyone can get the design on the same terms and can't use an exclusive right to foreclose competition in parts of the supply chain other than the one which is supposed to be under patent.
It's the illusion of market competition because the only way a company licenses IP it spends billion dollars a year updating and testing so that other manufacturers can undercut it on sales is if the government steps in and sets the price and decides who should and shouldn't be licensed 787 integrators (otherwise the answers are "too high for anyone to get involved" and "no, you guys that didn't coinvest in its development can't have licenses to sell anything more valuable than PMA parts"). And in practice not only do you get the government determining who is allowed to build 787s at what price, but also needing to underwrite the development costs, since "invest several billion in complex technology innovation; government will then determine the royalties you are entitled to earn from it" is not really an attractive proposition
> As opposed to the monopolist whose customers can't even switch to a competitor when the supplier has a safety scandal, yet operates under the same profit incentive to cut costs?
Yes, monopolists care more about maintaining the reputation of technology they've spent billions designing than random new market entrants established to manufacture others' IP more cheaply than them. Funnily enough subcontractors with little stake in the 737 specifically and the resulting diffusion of responsibility was the cause of the emergency door defects, and they're not going to do anything to solve MCAS either...
I don't think you need to entrain market arguments or whatnot to this, when it's only in the last decade China was a strong advanced manufacture player, and turbines are the kind of project that you probably wouldn't expect to go much faster than that regardless of the demand.
And don't think it doesn't matter for jet engines. This article gets into how the open acknowledgment and dissection of engine failure in the West promotes quality and that China has clearly not adopted this culture. Of course not.
They'll catch up in the same way the Soviet Union used to - at unsustainable cost and on the way to falling behind yet again.
Not that the tech industry leaders who are way too comfortable with fascism are making such a good showing either.
It’s really a bizarre statement, a sort of narcissistic need to feel persecuted amidst a life of plenty in the wealthiest society ever known. They have forced sterilization of Muslim women in China, up until recently forced abortions under the one child rule, and you get disappeared for criticizing dear leader. And your cozy life is comparably miserable? Only in your mind.
Speaking for myself obviously, but: absolutely yes
For jet engines, the only thing that comes to mind is electric aircraft. No single-crystal turbine blades needed at all. I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands.
(Now sure, you can substitute electric aircraft with open rotor jet engines which require different institutional knowledge to modern high bypass turbofans, but they're still really sensitive to how the blades are manufactured)
I know electric aircraft are not quite feasible on the same scale as airlines.
On the other hand, China has an extensive high-speed rail network for inland travel. OI have no idea how often the Chine fly inside the country vs how often they use aircraft, but this is the sort of different technology for the same purpose I mean.
It's even worse. Nowadays, in order to land, the aircraft needs to be almost empty, otherwise the mechanical structure that supports the stress of impact with the runway may break. So, heavier (as with batteries included) aircraft landing will mean the need to design sturdier landing gear, and stronger landing gear will most likely mean heavier materials as well.
I understand the idea you wanted to convey and that commenting on the technical detail is not something we're supposed to do, but the technical side of your example is just too glaring to ignore. A people-carrying aircraft, be it of electric propulsion, or of other type, is heavy. Like, several tons (at minimum) heavy. To acquire the necessary portance, the aircraft has to be accelerated (on its inert wheels) on the runway up to the take-off speed and then to be able to hold the cruising speed, using engines capable of generating such thrust by only moving the air. That's a lot of force right there, and the engine that has to do this, will have to be pretty tough. Regardless of the fact that the source of the on-board energy is electric or not, that same air will have to be moved, somehow, at the needed speeds, and it will be by an engine that will look and work pretty much the same way the current jet engines do, since the shape is dictated by the aerodynamics and the internal design is given by the (air) fluid dynamics it has to work with. The single-crystal turbine blades are just an optimization. Weaker (regular fine-grained casting) materials can be used, but that will mean limiting the performance to lower tolerance levels (and most likely be heavier as well, to compensate for the lower mechanical strength).
https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/aircraft-propulsion/b...
This isn't a free market problem. Companies move money out to avoid corporation tax, and government bailouts are what stop the free market from operating as it should.
General Motors?
Could also try not giving them the money.
Forcing others to do better - or not exist.
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.
Like everyday US wastes on healthcare over OECD basline = enough $$$ for PRC to build like 300km of HSR, stations hardware and all. 1 week of US healthcare waste can build out entire Beijing to Shanghai route. Chinese HSR is best demonstration of why developmental dictatorship works.
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.
in which conflicts have those air defenses proven themselves?
But unless you massively subsidize a company "cough Rolls Royce cough" then you can't compete at all with a generation or two behind commercial jet engine tech.
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...
if you develop everything anew there will be mismatches in tolerances and thousands of potential individual failure risks that can be combined in interesting, unexpected and fatal ways.
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.
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.
To imply they lack “individual integrity and honesty” is misinformed, deluded, and likely racist.
if China has such incredible engineering culture where are the jet engines? semiconductors ?
Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word racist. But in the same way that stupidity and evil look very similar, so do racism and ignorance.
im asking you a second time because you keep avoiding it: why can't china make jet engines and semiconductors if they have such great engineering culture and talent as you claim?
Rote learning, no democracy. Proper jet engines WILL come out of China soon. lol. Just watch this space.
"Technological sovereignty" sounds like something smart and glorious ... well, in the 6th grade history classes it was called "natural economy" of the feudalism.
China is 10x of Russia, and thus can build higher technological pyramid - the modern technology in my view is like a pyramid where the complexity of achievable technology at the top is defined by how broad is your foundation. The base of China's pyramid is growing by including more and more of its society into modern technological economy, yet it is still smaller than the Western world's pyramid. The original article exactly describes that the China's pyramid is still of not sufficient height/width for such a complex product like modern jet engine.