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.
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.
Honestly this is a good thing. I can endure buggy software but I don’t want to deal with buggy planes. Regulatory pressure is a market force and a useful one too. There’s a huge difference between ship fast and ship right - the latter one requires deep pockets and willingness to commit to ongoing risk. People always say big Pharma and aviation and such are oligopolies, and that’s bad, but they rarely see the capital intensiveness of the whole process. Some things are slow and deliberate and restricted to big corporate only for good reasons
Is aviation encumbered with patents like software development is?
For aerospace it's more like asking if Google, Meta, and Apple are encumbered by patents, because they're all big players. The smaller players tend to do one hyper-specific thing for a big player.<p>Also for aerospace the patents are more legitimate. Software is encumbered by stupid patents <obvious idea> <i>but on a computer!</i> whereas aerospace patents are more legitimately about hardware that indeed took years and millions to develop and optimize.
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.<p>If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.
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.<p>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.
>"50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west."<p>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
I even thought that the example of automobiles proved the jet engine analogy wrong.<p>Sure, automobiles aren’t as complex as a jet engine, but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.<p>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.<p>Same deal with things like high speed rail.
High speed rail technology is not a secret. We in the US just don’t have the will. Auto technology in China was acquired via tech transfers. In order to open mfg in China foreign concerns were forced into partnerships with local companies; moreover there was an effort to obtain foreign trade secrets. Metallurgy for jet fans isn’t one of the technologies the west has tried to partner with China. At this time the UK, the US and Russia hold the lead in that technology -maybe France has some too.
> but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.<p>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.<p>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.
Chinese automakers do (or did) make ICE and hybrid cars, too.<p>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?<p>[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.
Material sciences needed for modern jet engine blades are a closely guarded secret, and thanks to not manufacturing them in china, those secrets have managed to remain not stolen.<p>Fun story: it is not just jet engines - it is only recently that china was able to actually make indigenous <i>ballpoint pens</i> <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114</a>
You fell for a meme that was tired years ago already (your link is from 2017, after all). The article itself notes, “Relatively low-value items, like ballpoint pens, have not been a priority”, so obviously this says little about higher-priority military and industrial areas to which the CCP devotes greater effort.
It is not the pen, it is the pen <i>tip</i>. Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets. So you need cutting tolerances precise to 0.001 millimeters. If the socket is a fraction of a micron too loose, the ink leaks. Too tight, and the pen won't write.<p>Source from al-Arabiya:
<a href="https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-China-managed-to-make-ballpoint-pens" rel="nofollow">https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-Chi...</a><p>The point (no pun intended) is that China was beginning to crack the processes for making the precision machine tools that make machine tools.
Isn't China currently among the leaders of material science with lots of top 10 universities located in China? [0] (in rankings that do not incorporate prestige but actual scientific output)<p>[0] <a href="https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/" rel="nofollow">https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/</a>
its difficult to see from the lens of software and information technology, and open source academia, but physical science is often discovered via experimentation and cant just be brute forced. usually it disseminates as it is adopted into industrial process and is then copied. a lot of scientific discoveries are made due to impulsive-creative intuition<p>for example:
- until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany<p>- jet engine turbine blades today<p>- most historically: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire</a> , medieval napalm that nobody has been able to replicate even now
Quantity isn't quality.
All I know is that they produce a lot of engineers, while the US produces a lot gender studies majors. I rarely say it, but I do not foresee much that they won't be leaving us sharply behind on soon, other than poverty and homelessness, which we have pretty well covered.
There are about as many gender study majors in the U.S. per year as there are aviation engineering majors. That is one small niche of engineering majors that includes all of gender study.
Just noting, because no one else here will bother, that you will have a hard time proving anything in the parent comment untrue. Truth is not always pleasant
Seems they have figured out the single crystal blade tech <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-crystal-superalloy-jet-engine" rel="nofollow">https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-crystal-...</a>
recently? and you posted an almost 10yo article?
Can Chinese companies order just the blades from RR or P&W?<p>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.
They can order <i>engines</i> from RR or P&W<p>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...)
The RR video showing manual assembly of wax molds is a low volume development line. It isn't their main production process.
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While I think the scale of American decline is overstated, I think there is a degree of Hemingway's law of motion.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Advances like this are a feedback mechanism, being ahead gives you more resources to stay ahead.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
“America is in decline” is the consensus view. America dominating on all fronts is the contrarian view. I expect these views to swing like a pendulum in public discussion until something meaningful happens or until it’s clear in the rearview that America is in fact is more like UK, Japan, or Germany.
You can read about China's modern carrier-based, stealth fighter here: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35</a><p>There is a section about its engines: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35#Engines" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35#Engines</a><p>The first engine they used for the J-35 was the RD-33 (designed/built in Russia): <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_RD-33#RD-93" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_RD-33#RD-93</a> - It was not efficient enough for the J-35 and generated black smoke trails. China decided to design & build a China-based engine.<p>This is the engine for the early J-35 prototype, WS-13 built in China: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-13" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-13</a><p>This is the production engine for J-35, the WS-19: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-19" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-19</a><p>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).<p>Interesting: This is China's latest aircraft carrier, which has electromagnetic catapults, instead of steam-based: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Fujian" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Fujia...</a><p>You can see videos of the J-35 aircraft here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdCNAUjuRI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdCNAUjuRI</a>
For as long as the article is, surprised that it neglected to mention that the WS-10 started as an unlicensed copy of the CFM-56.
wow, this was a fantastic, fascinating read
A lot of claims in the article.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
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Can you please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines? You broke quite a few of them with this post.<p>You're welcome to express your views thoughtfully, but not aggressively. If you wouldn't mind reviewing <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a> and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.