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.
The market may not for the most capital-intensive businesses, but US laws at least attempt to address the situation. In Boeing's case, for example, the McDonnell-Douglas merger likely could have been blocked under existing anticompetitive laws.
The US's longstanding refusal to apply antiticompetition law causes a number of harms to consumers, entrepreneurs, and the stability of our economy.
Not letting Boeing grab McDonnell-Douglas military projects might have stopped some of that, but it might have also accelerated it.
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? We outsource the "commodity value add" parts of the process. We certainly do not put them at the center of corporate strategy.
I agree about "corporate rot." I don't think anyone has a good answer to this either. 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 creates room in the market for renewal, 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...)
Sounds like the free market hasn't been tried, a key plank of the free market on the supply side is that incompetent managers have to go bankrupt and lose their capital or otherwise get squeezed out. If the government is going to bail people out then obviously the companies will take adopt a ridiculously risky management strategy because they get the upside and dodge the downside, so they just have to maximise the potential upside at any cost. No surprise if after getting a bailout people do exactly what they did that led to the bailout until they need another bailout. Why change?
The trick to "mandating" of good corporate governance is not to bail them out. Then at least the corporations will be governed in a way that they aren't likely to go bankrupt. Maybe even make things people want and sell them at a profit.
> here'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.
Is there actual evidence for this, or are the companies involved just doing a good enough job that the market doesn't see a need for new entrants? Because it actually seems a bit implausible that these technologies could just disappear or even become less available under a free market. What we actually see is the likes of NVidia or ASML, where other players can't catch up because the market leader is just pushing the cutting edge forward too quickly (spare a thought for Intel, who was the unbeatable colossus once).
Put differently: if the population of the earth were 50 Billion people instead of 8 Billion - then we'd have markets with enough competition to allow free market dynamics.
In that context, then we'd have 'Space companies' being subsidized.
We'd have a hotel on the Moon and we'd easily be on Mars already.
Those aircraft are on the 'edge of our resource capabilities' - huge companies at the top of the pyramid.
If we had a massively bigger economic pyramid, they would be more like car companies.
One nitpick, all the money in the world would be able to achieve the goal by simply giving rides away for free.
Overall, I agree that any industry that is extremely optimized requiring ultra high precision+knowledge in multiple verticals makes the barrier to entry beyond difficult. It just requires too much up front cash.
For a very brief moment, under the existential crisis condition of total war in WW2, the US government was somehow able to corral corporate governance towards a semblance of common purpose (survival). As I understand it from historians malfeasance was still widespread, but we arguably maybe got a good enough outcome?
This is the corporate equivalent of the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations problem. And if that corollary is true, then I suspect the remedy is similarly not entirely amenable to deterministic antiseptic metrics and processes; they're necessary but not sufficient conditions.
Basically, China excellence in EVs and Solar was driven by the market being new. It's hard (almost impossible?) to outrank an incumbent very entrenched in a big market. You need a paradigm shift (ie: iphone vs nokia) to make the change.
I imagine the manufacturing breakthrough for high temperature jet turbine blades could be additive manufacturing where you grow the crystalline structure layer by layer instead of casting and carefully nurturing it. Mature markets with few incumbents focus on local maxima and have difficulty to move from one maxima to another, while a new manufacturer can start from a different position and search for other maxima.
So yes, that does happen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140
(it's particularly hilarious (in the bad way), that German secret services were participating in spying as well)
Thankfully some countries (here: Brazil) have some spine to react to it: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/saab-wins-brazil-je...
Free markets don't exist.
The problem isn't what you think it is. It's Dunning-Kruger effect and 99% of the population is living it loud and proud.
A plane built for resilience against defective engine components would be very different from the airliners we fly today. I would assume more engines for redundancy, better protection against catastrophic failure, different designs to allow engines to function even if parts flew out, and so on. It’s an interesting design exercise to build from radically different expectations from the fundamental parts.
Alternatively, a far less radical redesign would be turbines running at a much more forgiving regime feeding electric motors.
Do you think todays aircraft are not designed with the idea that the engine can fail?
And if you have unreliable components do you think redundancy is going to save you?
And lets be real - there already exist a aerospace arena where you have a higher number of CAT-events - it's called the military. And they deal with it by having a parachute for each passenger..
No - in effect building jet-engines (that are commercially viable i.e. fuel and efficeny) is not a easy to disrupt business. And the cost of entering it would be - high. And the benefit, well less obvious.
Of course they are - but the engines are also designed to be extremely reliable, and that's why you get away with two engines on long flights over water, something previously only available for planes with four engines.
> No - in effect building jet-engines (that are commercially viable i.e. fuel and efficeny) is not a easy to disrupt business.
That's true. My point being that building a better jet engine might be the hardest way to disrupt the business - making a better propulsion system, which might or not include a jet engine, is a less difficult approach. If you have an electric plane with two motors, a big APU-like turbine charging a battery and powering the motors, you might get away with a cheaper turbine, running in less extreme regimes, and still have a more fuel efficient plane requiring less maintenance than a pure turboprop would.
You don't win a stacked game by playing it by the rules. You win by changing the game to another one you can actually win. China did that with cars already.
I know your comment was likely made as a knee jerk reaction to the above comment but I implore the reader to actually consider the process and incentives by which rules and regulations are created and how an assumption of good faith negatively affects the rules and laws we get.
Also for aerospace the patents are more legitimate. Software is encumbered by stupid patents <obvious idea> but on a computer! whereas aerospace patents are more legitimately about hardware that indeed took years and millions to develop and optimize.
Something that leaps out at me reading through semiconductor and aerospace patents is a noticeable fraction of them are basically saying, "hey, <non-obvious process understanding that pushes our limits of comprehension of physics required> to achieve some desired effect was found to be useful, but it consumed <years and millions to develop and optimize> because it was such a convoluted journey filled with zillions of dead ends, so we want a patent on that because the end result only looks obvious in hindsight". I don't see as much of this in software at this time, though I suspect it may change in the future.
https://precisionam.com/articles/precision-machining/itar-re...
https://aircraft.zone/navigating-the-rules-a-guide-to-u-s-ex...
Will jet engines never be made in China? Don't bet against them. There's no guarantee that the legacy of the Cold War technology race will continue to subsidize western jet engine development.
There are reasons to think this subsidized moat will hold for a while: geared turbofan engines will deliver another increment in efficiency that passenger airlines can't ignore. Until that technology step is commoditized, the incumbent jet engine makers are relatively safe.
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.
You seem to believe that China's military ambitions are purely defensive, but that is not the case. They have grandiose expansionist ambitions which include basically the entire South China Sea - which in spite of its name is shared by many countries. Not to mention their explicit goal of eventually conquering Taiwan. Their military doctrine is fundamentally offensive and does require air power.
In other words, let's says the Chinese military jet engine is 15 years behind is say fuel economy. Which reduces range. If the conflict is local that doesn't matter overmuch.
Equally operating from land, not carriers, reduces reach, but if what you want to reach is local then that doesn't matter.
If China has military ambitions (and despite the sabre rattling there's no overt indication of that), they are all in a specific area.
By contrast the US likes to participate in, or instigate, actions far from home. Moving planes means long open-ocean ferry flights. Single-engine reliability, range, effeciency and so on is paramout.
Equally the US relies on friendly local countries to provide support bases, logistics, fuel and so on. As evidenced just this year, that support can be withdrawn. Will Japan or Korea want to be dragged into a US / China conflict over Taiwan?
So if the Chinese are operating engines later than the first gulf War, and on par with the second, I'm not sure that's a defining difference.
The US doctrine of air-defence suppression followed by air superiority may not be possible in a space near the Chinese mainland.
Supercruise also matters a bit less when the distance to combat is shorter. Less fuel expended on "getting there" is more fuel for "on station". Plus, assuming more-or-less unlimited supply of machines and pilots means more flight hours on station.
So while the engines play a part in a hypothetical conflict, supply lines (and the length thereof) play (I think) a larger part.
Maintenance hours are sure to matter in a real war where equipment is getting destroyed and supply lines are being disrupted.
The difference isn’t huge (I think it’s 10-20% or something), but when fuel is your main cost that’s enough to make older engines undesirable
A 10-20% reduction in fuel burn is actually considered pretty huge...
Also, the domestic commercial jet market is still sizable, so excluding the domestic market from analyses is kinda weird.
Finally, lots of countries are spooked by arbitrary US sanctions and want to diversify.
With petrol/diesel engines they just gave up and went straight to electric, but there's no viable alternative to jet engines for planes, so they'll put in the work (plus the military incentive running in parallel)
No, but regional aviation can be well served by electrification - a jet engine needs to run at a speed it pushed enough air through itself to propel the plane forward, but a turbine feeding a generator that powers a couple electric motors can run at a far more forgiving regime.
As pointed out elsewhere, all it might take is a paradigm shift to unseat the current incumbents.
in which conflicts have those air defenses proven themselves?
The only use case is modern day AI workloads, but that's used more in planning than in the field. I can imagine a use case for e.g. image recognition, but again, that tech or the level required is not new at all and doesn't need state of the art chip tech.
That's also why they're so damned expensive, and why it's difficult for upstarts to break into the market with cheaper alternatives. Like any tech company, once they get the customer locked into a platform they're constantly pushing upgrades to both stay technologically competitive and, more importantly, keep their margins high.
If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.
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.
Once China figures out how to have both at the same time, they will basically take over the worldwide market, let alone their domestic market.
You’re joking. These have been put on network drives since early 2000s and CCP has hacked and exfil them
you don't exactly need to hack a network drive when you can just hire the guy who came up with it
It's not clear to me whether you already knew that those three names in particular are idiomatic in China as the names of 'random' people. 张三，李四，王五.
(Traditionally 李 was the most common surname in China. Last I heard it had been overtaken by 王.)
I don't know who random guys One and Two are.
Bollocks. Russia does that as well, single crystal turbine blades in particular so the west is not the sole gatekeeper here. Given the circumstances Russia might as well share the tech for some things in return
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.
Say what you will, but I don't consider eminent domain to be some kind of mystical technology that only wizards possess.
For automobiles, China didn't compete with the West on its own turf in heavily regulated markets. They embraced EVs from the beginning. Complex auto regulations can't save Europe because EVs are an end-run around all of the complexity of building an economical, low-polluting engine.
Indeed, Europe is talking about relaxing some of its environmental regulations for petrol cars, now that those regulations are more of a barrier to home companies than foreign ones.
They are often made of superalloys, yet regular cars, down to econoboxes costing 20-30k or less have them, and are made by the millions.
It doesn’t even take a lot to understand that. It’s the same tried method they’ve been applying for decades now; information gathering, rapid prototyping cycles, quality threshold goals, led by overcapacity dominance. It’s really not much different than agile and “hyperscaling”, accepting massive losses for a long period because the objective is shifting core dynamics.
Ironically, in the US it was used to crush competition and innovation and parasitize the society while on the global scale, China is increasing competition and/or breaking up the monopoly of the parasitic cabal that controls the West and long the world.
I'm not sure China is known for their ICE designs. Like Korea, I suspect China partially pushed hard for EV specifically because the complexity in a battery + motor system is meaningfully simpler than the ICE equivalent and there's relatively little overlap in many facets outside of some first principles.
Jet engines are like ICE, but with a very reliability threshold. ICE is already complicated, but OEMs will accept a certain deviation on reliability if they need to because occurence might be low and severity is manageable. Not so in jet engine design. A single failure is a big deal.
I suspect it's wouldn't have been good strategy to try to build those cars for the US, CA or EU markets. An ICE engine is relatively straightforward, but hitting emissions and fuel efficiency targets is complex. [1] And the future of ICE cars, especially in those markets, is limited... why build out emissions expertise, when you can get your foot in the door with EVs?
[1] I recently bought a 1981 VW Vanagon which I try to maintain. That's a perfect time period to see how emissions control forces engine design. My engine has fuel injection and EGR, but a few years back has the same engine block with a carburetor; california emissions uses the same engine, but adds electronic ignition and an o2 sensor in the exhaust for closed loop injection control. A couple years later and they added water cooling. Every so often emissions and efficiency standards got harder to meet and you have to do more stuff.
Mainly copies of Japanese and US designs.
Low reliability and safety issues kills car brands. Consumers really don’t like it.
Sure, jet engines are on a very different level of reliability standards, but it seems to me that the concepts are all the same: highly regulated market of low-margin complex heavy machinery where it’s difficult to be a new entrant in the market.
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.
Fun story: it is not just jet engines - it is only recently that china was able to actually make indigenous ballpoint pens https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114
Source from al-Arabiya: https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-Chi...
The point (no pun intended) is that China was beginning to crack the processes for making the precision machine tools that make machine tools.
" China's inability to produce a complete, high-quality ballpoint pen came to widespread attention in 2015, when Prime Minister Li Keqiang singled out the products at a seminar in Beijing, noting that his writing was "rough" when he used Chinese-made ballpoint pens. For Li, China's failure to manufacture a complete ballpoint pen was indicative of the Chinese economy's weaknesses. "That's the real situation facing us," Li said at the time. "We cannot make ballpoint pens with a smooth writing function." "
https://www.smh.com.au/world/finally-china-manufactures-a-ba...
> 2.3-millimetre
its a clear prioritzation choice from the government, and that prioritization is itself a technology
notably this same prioritization mode resulted in the soviet union failing to produce quality of life improvements for its citizens.
the failure is that the CCP is unable to prioritize making simple useful stuff
We already know this was an issue with the soviets, back when they had the plans for us jet engines (for fighter planes), but couldn't replicate them. Same for stealth, hell even some of their rocketry. And the soviets had plenty of auxiliary systems already in place, during the cold war. As someone said above, they could do quantity, they could do limited high-quality, but couldn't do both at the same time.
There are things that work with 5-year plans: railroads, road infra, buildings, etc. And there are things that are not that easy, and take multiple decades from when the order comes to having it realised. Something that's not immediately obvious for western folks is that when you mix central planning with authoritarian governments, you will get a huge number of pain points along the way, where orders come downwards towards the ones executing them, and overreporting/missrepresentations/lies go upwards. It's like the longest game of telephone, where you start from the top, demanding x y z, get reports that you're on your way of getting 3x, 3y, 3z and in reality you have some of x, none of y, and z looks like z but it's actually three x's in a trench coat.
[0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/
for example: - until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany
- jet engine turbine blades today
- most historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire , medieval napalm that nobody has been able to replicate even now
Is it willing to buy gender theory from you for similar amounts of money? If not, the production of specialized majors should not be 1:1.
Historically, societies which produced a lot of ideologically minded professionals (such as clergy), tended towards implementing that ideology top-down. I am on board with Turchin's theory of elite overproduction here, and gender studies is modern equivalent of catechism.
To choose a less ideological example: personally, I love Egyptology, but I would be a strict opponent of producing as many Egyptologists as aerospace engineers. Chances are that the superfluous graduates would push for an Egyptocentric department in every public institution and half of private ones.
> DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost.
US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials.
The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.
I've watched their manufacturing video recently and shocked how much of it was hand labour - it's not something I'd associate with precision. My partner said they must know better tho lol.
But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)
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.
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.
Interesting reading. Sadly, once I encountered this, I realized the article was extremely biased. The USSR successfully achieved this several times.
I suspect this article will age badly after WS-15 goes live. China has significantly narrowed the gap.
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
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.
Distances over 1000 km are already favorable for passenger jets. Even in today's Western Europe, there just aren't that many really long distance trains (by which I mean something like Amsterdam-Barcelona or Copenhagen-Milan).
The only real reason you would fly this route would be as a connecting flight. But if you just want to travel from Beijing to Shanghai, HSR is the obvious choice. It probably takes less time overall, and it's way more comfortable. You can even order takeout from restaurants along the way, delivered to your seat.
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.
Rote learning, no democracy. Proper jet engines WILL come out of China soon. lol. Just watch this space.
Turbojet/fan core programs bottle neck isn't technical, its political / organizational, assuming some base pop scale, i.e. need to sustain specialized aerospace workforce of a few 100k which most countries can not - and EU has to as bloc - but trivial for PRC. What's hard is building the entire process / development pipeline etcs. Tremendously expensive and takes political will to sustain, with little expectation of returns, over 10-20 years. This was last piece PRC was building out post 00s, which basically caught up ~50 years in ~10 years for military hot section... aka one should expect rapid catchup in civil aviation if PRC serious. As if PRC not good at parallel iterations and tacit knowledge buildup at PRC scale. But IMO civil aviation not PRC serious/priority, nothing that increase reliance on fossil is.
The other caveat is commercial aviation is deeply geopolitical, PRC can very well have competitive engines and still have difficulty commercializing because west currently has chokehold on regulatory/certification. Half the reason COMAC went with western components is due to ease of certification, really if PRC wanted right now, they can plug Y20 avionics / components into domestic narrow/wide body (turbojet not 1:1 price/perf swamp with turbofan) but the point is PRC at point where if they wanted completely indigenize domestic civil aviation with eye on medium/long term global expansion, they could.
Other thing to consider is "commercial" viability of jet engines is pegged to oil price, i.e. aviation fuel opex at current prices means marginally more performant engines (5-10% better fuel efficiency) will economically pay themselves off over lifespan at recent fuel prices. If aviation fuels dips to historically precedented lows, PRC ability to involute component prices to commodity levels can become competitive, i.e. the economics of spares/maintenance of having lower priced hulls > fuel price.
But ultimately, formula for frontier capabilities is basically having industrial policy that can eat a lot of losses during incubation while generating/coordinating the required talent.
Going from near zero 40 years ago to being just 10 years behind the state of the art now is actually pretty rapid convergence. Calling that a "failure" is strange.
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.
The author does not notice that the F-35 is a single engine jet rated for VSTOL flight characteristics. The F135 is required to produce that much thrust by itself to support that profile. The J-20 is a twin-engine fighter. Why, pray tell, does the engine designed for a twin engine, land based fighter designed for carrying large payloads of air to air munitions need to beat the thrust of the F135? The comparison is worse than stupid.
The Chinese Flanker fleet is being built out and maintained at scale with WS-10s, it's industries churn out 100-120 J-20s per year, all with twin WS-15s. This is a mature jet engine capability, at massive scale. "Not made in China"???
The author makes a passing comment that the WS-15 is "outdated" compared to NATO forces. They are clearly blissfully unaware that the F-18 Super Hornet standard runs the F414 powerplant, as old as the WS-15, itself an upgrade on the F404 powerplant, 50 years old now. The F-18F is the USN's mainline pacific theatre fighter.
I honestly believe anyone who considers the Chinese jet engine program to have been a failure to have perhaps lost some marbles along the way. It demonstrably is not, unless you think the PLAAF is about to collapse midair, a notion their daily ADIZ violations and interceptions over the SCS and the Taiwan straits should thoroughly disabuse. My prediction is by 2037 the entirety of Chinese domestic civil aviation will be running the C919 and they'll be a serious competitive threat to Airbus and Boeing.
First, the certification process in aviation absolutely is a massive issue. This was in large part the undoing of Bombardier. Well, that and Boeing successfully getting the US government to put 300% tariffs on them. But one of their go-to-market delays was that they simply weren't set up for FAA's processes and that was a mistake.
Second, I think there's a difference between the China of now and the China of the 1970s. It seems like Deng Xiaoping did kind of throw money at problems. I don't think that's true anymore. Or at least it's far more integrated and thoughtful that it might've once been. The example I'm thinking of is EUV. Go back 2-3 years and you'll probably find a lot of people who would say China won't replicate EUV for similar reasons about the supply chain, interdependence and vertical integration. But we're only a few years away from that now. The author is correct to raise an important factor: local demand. This was the mistake (IMHO) of US bans on exporting the best chips to China: it created a captive local market for Huawei chips.
Third, if I was in charge of bootstrapping a jet engine ecosystem (that's really what it is) given all the very real problems the author raised, how would I do it? I'd to bootstrap the materials side and manufacturing in other industries that don't have the stringent testing and regulation requirements of commercial aviation. Gas turbines, medical equipment, orthopedics, that sort of thing.
If you're a small country, sure, that kind of strategy might make sense. Pick your battles, run the country like a startup (i.e. bet on one or two industries). China's strategy is the opposite of that: just make production costs low across the board (transport, energy, housing, etc.) and let everything else follow. With 1.4 billion people, something somewhere is bound to pop off.
People are reading way too much into the 5-year plans. It basically boils down to "do science across the board, but lean a bit more into these areas."
So yeah their five year plans are indeed often “Invest in science/engineering”, they are an interesting country.
"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.
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.
I hate these terms. They always seem so meaningless. Normally those kind of terms grow out of some kind of useful analogy that helps you picture what they mean. I don't find that at all. MBA speak
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.
Losing a fan blade, as demonstrated in your two youtube links, is both a more likely event to occur and low enough energy to be able to contain with a reasonable structure.
However consider the situation in [0] where a turbine disk became detached from its shaft. The disk is still taking power from the exhaust gas, but rather using the energy to power the compressor or rotate the fan it is now just increasing its own kinetic energy. This continues until the incredibly strong turbine disk rotates itself apart. From the linked article:
> For engineering purposes, disk fragments are assumed to have infinite energy at the moment of release; they will cut through any reasonable material and cannot be contained
You can see from photographs of the aftermath, the nacelle is missing where this happened
[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
The passenger's seatbelt was buckled.
https://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/aircraf...
"When flight attendant C reached row 14, she saw that the head, upper torso, and arms of the passenger seated in 14A had been pulled outside the airplane through the window. The passenger’s seat belt was buckled. Flight attendant C grabbed onto the passenger and, with assistance from flight attendant A, tried to bring the passenger back into the airplane, but flight attendant A reported that they could not get the passenger back into the airplane by themselves because of the pressure and the altitude. Two male passengers (in seats 8D and 13D) offered to help; they were able to pull the passenger back into the airplane and laid the injured passenger across seats 14ABC."
RIP Jennifer Riordan.
Take this incident for example:
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
... and implied by that is that no one who holds that knowledge is going to be braindead enough and go and help China to destroy their industry just like they did with 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.
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.
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).
it's well known that the way China dominated in solar panels was by "transferring" (aka stealing) the IP from US solar panel makers who had foolishly set up shop in China to reduce costs, and ended up going out of business once Chinese companies got the IP and was able to use their resources or gov subsidies to undercut on price.
I'm not saying that this is always been the reason for China's ability to quickly catch up but it is definitely a factor. Anyone who has worked in China (as I did for a number of years) knows that IP is not safe there (it's not just foreign companies who experience this, Chinese companies find their IP copied by other Chinese companies), and the courts provide almost no help to foreign companies (this may have changed as of 2017, when I left China, up until that point no foreign company had won a significant court case against a Chinese company in a Chinese court).