alt Hacker NewsWhy jet engines aren't made in China
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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.
Jet Engines Aren’t “Made In China” because companies are not allowed to outsource jet engines manufacturing to China. Gas turbine engines and associated equipment are seen as military technology, which is subject export controls by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) of U.S. Department of State.
https://precisionam.com/articles/precision-machining/itar-re...
https://aircraft.zone/navigating-the-rules-a-guide-to-u-s-ex...
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.
> 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.
> And jet engines do not have any lower-tier market with underserved demand
They actually do. The segment of small jet-powered (military) drones is rapidly growing and isn't served by the big jet engine manufacturers.
Veritasium made an episode not long ago describing the design and manufacture of turbine blades:
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.
Just to add, the primary failure mode of critical jet engine components is fatigue. To see, and thus learn, from fatigue failures in the field you need thousands of components flying thousands of hours, this takes years or decades. And to learn from this in a way that let's you improve design you first have to get past manufacturing and maintenance induced issues. Which is to say, it takes time to get good at jet engines, on the order of decades when you are talking about the tightest margin sector of the field (big commercial engines).
You can read about China's modern carrier-based, stealth fighter here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35
There is a section about its engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35#Engines
The first engine they used for the J-35 was the RD-33 (designed/built in Russia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_RD-33#RD-93 - It was not efficient enough for the J-35 and generated black smoke trails. China decided to design & build a China-based engine.
This is the engine for the early J-35 prototype, WS-13 built in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-13
This is the production engine for J-35, the WS-19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-19
China has built 50+ J-35 aircraft, and is scaling up production to support their domestic military, and also export orders to other militaries (including Pakistan, and possibly Russia).
Interesting: This is China's latest aircraft carrier, which has electromagnetic catapults, instead of steam-based: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Fujia...
You can see videos of the J-35 aircraft here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdCNAUjuRI
I think part of it comes down to trust. GE can trust that metal alloy from its supplier will not be substituted, etc. They still have to manage quality but they don't have to vertically integrate just to get the level of quality they need.
> The USSR, now Russia, entered in the 1950s, when the technology was still new and the Western advantage was much smaller, and they still, over their entire history, did not produce a civil or military engine that had parity with West.
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.
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.
There is a lot of black art stuff in jet engine manufacturing, but if this article is supposed to be reassuring to Americans, it's not to me. They're saying that China was 21 years behind on the previous generation of engines, and they're going to be 7 years behind on the next one. That sounds like they're catching up pretty fast.
I don't know where they're at in terms of civil engines, but each new generation of engines eeks out less and less additional performance. If China comes out with something like the CFM LEAP at a good price, I'd imagine they could sell that for many years to come.
Jet engines are far more high-tech than most people imagine, but I'm not convinced this is evidence of some inherent Chinese weakness. The obvious explanation is that China started much later in an insanely difficult field.
They are narrowing a gap measured in decades. The article explains the difficulty well, but it doesn't convince me that China can't eventually (again, given enough time) build good engines, especially for domestic military use.
Same for semi-conductors, IMHO.
Outdated copium TBH. PRC engine programs going smooth last 10 years, doing their on variable bypass programs as well.
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.
I know it's not the point of the article but wow I learned a lot about metallurgy and kind of fell down a rabbit hole. Great stuff
Assuming China has spent 50 years already on jet engines, yeah. All these article just write off China.
Rote learning, no democracy. Proper jet engines WILL come out of China soon. lol. Just watch this space.
This may be a stupid question - but can't China just buy some airbus/boeing planes, take the engine apart and then manufacture each part as is?
Minor nitpick: Rolls-Royce military jet engines are made at Bristol (ex-Bristol Aerospace), but civilian turbines like the Trent series are made in Derby.
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.
If they can build rocket engines they can build jet engines.
meta: isn't there a long history of such retrospective analysis where when a country does well economically, it's due to something in their culture?
this interview also talked a bit about the reasons its hard for get turbines to be manufactured in China, but coming at it from the gas power generation side. https://www.decouple.media/p/the-gas-turbine-the-final-revel...
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.
Probably the most head in the sand mil-tech article I've read in long time. There are very few explicit claims the author makes about Chinese capability that can be addressed, most of it just gesturing at anecdotes or vibes.
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.
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.
Very informative but there's some key potentialities left unexplored. For example what if a simpler jet engine could be produced based on a future electric battery powered plane. After all the article emphasizes that China exploited the simplification of a new market in the waning internal combustion engine era
> Each of these companies relies on a deep network of suppliers
Isn’t this by design? ie each country customer has an important stage in the supply chain so that if the primary country fails to deliver, a supply countries can choke global orders
... They are making Jet engines. Lots of them.
This article is full of laymen's inaccuracy that indicates the author is not anywhere close to the depth of the field.
> China’s first fifth-generation fighter, the Chengdu J-20B, relied on a thirty-year old Russian AL-31 for a full decade until its domestic WS-15 program, which was started in the 1990s, was deemed ready for production.
There is no J-20B J-20 has been using WS-10C for at least 3-5 years
> China has excelled in industries with legible technological targets, well-known manufacturing processes, and fast iteration cycles.
I cannot believe people still think an advancing manufacturing economy just stops at certain threshold. That's plainly illogical.
Jet engine has legible technology targets. Well-known manufacturing processes. Not-so-fast-in-common-sense iteration cycles.
If I am poor, of cuz I am not have time to make a beautiful suit for myself. I need to first make the house, a shabby one as well. Until one day I started make the suit. That has nothing to do with the suit being less clear targets, processes, or whatever.
> Additionally, there was existing synergy China could exploit. Chinese EV success was predicated on earlier successes in battery manufacturing.
Yes, of cuz, battery manufacturing was considered beyond China's capability before ...
I think we all know why nobody risks that. It's because of a terrible quality. But saying so is somehow "holy wars". It is not.
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 framing here is sensationalist.
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.
Meta. Horizontal/vertical integration/scaling. Terms used throughout the article.
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
This is a fascinating read. I have 3 thoughts.
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.
> A failure in these blades would be catastrophic, resulting in the destruction of the engine, likely followed by the plane itself.
Aaaaand the author just lost any credibility with me whatsoever. This is someone who knows big words, maybe did some research and ChatGPTing, and doesn't actually know shit about aircraft or their engines.
On passenger aircraft because passengers sit directly inline with the path a blade with insane levels of kinetic energy will probably go, the nacelle is designed to contain it.
The engine must be able to contain a "blade off" event where a blade snaps during full rated thrust. Two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j973645y5AA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcALjMJbAvU
The aircraft will not be "destroyed."
The blade could fail during takeoff climb and the plane would still be able to climb because all twin engine passenger jet aircraft must be able to conduct all phases of flight on one engine.
SWA 1380 had a passenger fatality not because of the blade hitting them, but because part of the cowling disintegrated, broke the window, and she was partially sucked out of the aircraft, which killed her.
If she'd been wearing her seatbelt, she would likely be alive today. As would several other passengers who, over the years, have been killed by debris breaking the window and them being sucked out.
The blade itself did not leave the engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380
That article lists a number of incidents, in roughly half of which the blade was contained. All the flights made it back to an airport...
A lot of claims in the article.
IDK if the WS-15 failed or is "two decades" behind. I think we just don't know, but we do know that it is that they have achieved the ability to deliver, in mass, third-generation single-crystal nickel-based superalloys. That's a strong proof point.
As for commercial, China can/has grant a sizable portion of the C919 to domestic engine producers ( I think AECC has this contract ) that allows for a lot of capital and practice.
I would not be shocked if China demonstrates highly competitive engines in the late 2020, maybe with a few setbacks and iterations. I would also not be shocked if they started demonstrating engines with some characteristics slightly better than the Western manufactures in that time period (or maybe a little later).
The OP is trying to summarize a 1.4Bn country failure to achieve jet engine in: if you do these couple tricks; or because of these two things.
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."
wow, this was a fantastic, fascinating read
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.
> When it takes months to determine whether a single change has produced a positive impact, directional intuition is critical to faster development, and that lives entirely as tacit knowledge amongst generations of aerospace, materials, and mechanical engineers.
... 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.
..Yet.
another reason why China can't build jet engines: the jet engine manufacturers never relocated their manufacturing to China, which therefore prevented the Chinese from getting their hands on their IP.
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).
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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.
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.