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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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...
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-...
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.
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, yet it is still smaller than the Western world "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.
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
If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.
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
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...)
> 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.
[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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.