Why jet engines aren't made in China

https://aakash.substack.com/p/why-jet-engines-arent-made-in-china

by paulpauper • 22 days ago

314 313 22 days ago

aakash.substack.com

ivell2• 22 days ago

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.

dmitrygr2• 22 days ago

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.

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

didntknowyou• 22 days ago

recently? and you posted an almost 10yo article?

dzhiurgis• 22 days ago

Can Chinese companies order just the blades from RR or P&W?

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.

ivell2• 22 days ago

Seems they have figured out the single crystal blade tech https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-crystal-...

azan_3• 21 days ago

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)

[0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/

TFNA2• 21 days ago

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.

OneDonOne4• 21 days ago

It is not the pen, it is the pen tip. 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.

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.

NitpickLawyer• 21 days ago

It's not even that. You can have all the designs you need, but you also need a bunch of downstream tech to get from drawings to production. This is something that centrally planned economies struggle with. You can't 5-year-plan your way to jet-engines if you haven't previously 5-year-planned for all the auxiliary infrastructure needed to support that.

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.

Grombobulous3• 21 days ago

I even thought that the example of automobiles proved the jet engine analogy wrong.

Sure, automobiles aren’t as complex as a jet engine, but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.

Something like 10 years ago we were laughing at videos of Chinese cars spectacularly failing crash tests, and now China is selling to very heavily regulated markets.

Same deal with things like high speed rail.

SecretDreams2• 21 days ago

but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.

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.

mc322• 21 days ago

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.

labcomputer• 21 days ago

HSR is just a willingness to say "fuck you" to people who want to hold up progress by refusing to sell land for any price, or who sue to stop a more environmentally-friendly transportation on the grounds of... <checks notes>... environmental impact.

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.

torginus2• 21 days ago

Very surprisingly it's never mentioned that car turbos have very similar requirements - spin at 10K+ RPM at 10000K+ for or tens of thousands of hours with little expected maintenance.

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.

roysting• 21 days ago

I agree. They built the J-20, including the engines with several variants. When you look at the whole landscape, it is clearly deliberate and strategic prioritization and sequencing that was the limiting factor.

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.

queenkjuul7• 19 days ago

Year the article very much ignores that Geely actually can produce a competent modern combustion engine. Their latest model for use in hybrid drivetrains broke the record for thermal efficiency in a consumer combustion engine.

It also treats EV motors as "commodity brushless motors" completely glossing over the actual engineering behind modern EV motors.

Twenty five years ago a Chinese supercomputer was laughable. Today they build them. Ten years ago Chinese cars were laughable, now they're sold worldwide. Ten years ago people laughed at the "metro to nowhere," now it's the core of a new central business district.

The fact that domestic Chinese engines have entered military service, to me, is a pretty strong indicator that given another decade or two, they'll be building some of the most competitive jet engines on earth.

seanmcdirmid4• 21 days ago

Material engineering is the well known blocker for China, same with semiconductors. They basically have to replicate 50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west.

China hasn’t mastered chips either yet in the same way it hasn’t mastered jet turbines: they can do cheap (high yields, low maintenance costs per hour of use), they can do high performance, they can’t do both yet at the same time.

FpUser• 21 days ago

"50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west."

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

stogot• 21 days ago

“ well kept under lock in key in the west”

You’re joking. These have been put on network drives since early 2000s and CCP has hacked and exfil them

dboreham• 21 days ago

So like...bone china then?

russli19933• 21 days ago

CJ1000A is being certified by 2028. It is equivalent to LEAP engines on fuel burn. WS15 and WS19 are all shipping today and have thrust to weight ratio above 10. CJ2000 is a 35-ton trust, genx fuel burn class engine, on track for 2030.

torginus2• 21 days ago

It seems the author started from a desiserd conclusion, and strung together fact(oid)s to support it without any understanding of them, sometimes making huge mistakes.

For example the monocrystalline blades, which are touted as some holy grain, were in production engines on both sides of the iron curtain by the 70s. China has mastered this technology by the 2010s at the latest.

As for airliner engines, I looked up both the LEAP and the PW1000 and their 'hot' part - the turbines - have fairly conservative specs, roughly on par with these aforementioned 70s US/Soviet fighter engines. This is the technology tha's more or less shared between military and civilian engines.

The big Western advantage comes from manufacturing the bypass fan - the composite blades and the high-speed gearbox connecting them to the jet 'core' are technologies that the West has a huge lead on and that's why the reason comparable Russian and Chinese engines don't exist.

But strictly speaking, that's not really directly related to the tech in the turbine 'cores' which most people refer to when speaking about jets and not a peep is made about this in the article.

null_shift2• 20 days ago

As someone in the industry it is amusing to watch HN do some cursory googling and then make definitive statements with confidence.

Lerc• 21 days ago

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.

hdz• 21 days ago

“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.

bluGill2• 21 days ago

Certainly that's the consensus view. However, I have yet to see any evidence that people within the consensus actually have done any analysis to find the truth. They just have sort of feeling which is driven by the press which presents a story.

TulliusCicero• 21 days ago

I think it's less that America is declining and more that China is rising. And really, most of the world is getting richer.

HardCodedBias• 21 days ago

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).

russli19933• 21 days ago

WS 15 is already shipping with latest J20, its trust to weight ratio is above 10.

justincarter• 21 days ago

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.

dylan604• 21 days ago

Is aviation encumbered with patents like software development is?

colechristensen• 21 days ago

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.

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.

usernametaken292• 21 days ago

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

rbanffy7• 21 days ago

I can endure buggy software but I don’t want to deal with buggy planes

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.

leonidasrup5• 21 days ago

There is an old saying in the engineering world: “Regulations are written in blood.

AnthonyMouse7• 21 days ago

Regulatory pressure is a market force and a useful one too.

That's assuming the regulations are competent. But if you let the market consolidate then the incumbent has enough money to buy off the government. Or it happens the other way around and the government is kind enough to set out regulations that only a megacorp can satisfy, thereby destroying the competition and awarding the last company standing the vaunted "too big to fail" get out of jail free card.

Which in turn gets you the 737 MAX sort of problems where the regulations both cause a problem (recertification is prohibitively expensive) and then fail to impede the incumbent's efforts to shirk it because you can't be damaging the business of your only domestic producer.

wilkommen• 21 days ago

I agree that regulatory pressure is a market force (I wish more people understood this), but I disagree that capital intensive things that must be done right can only be done by big organizations - quite the opposite. If the regulatory environment is strong and effective, small organizations can thrive even in pharma and aviation. If an industry is comprised solely of huge organizations, then when one becomes corrupted (like Boeing has, see the 737 MAX debacle) it becomes impossible to terminate that organization. Organizations that are too big to fail are too big to be regulated.

dv35z• 21 days ago

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

linzhangrun• 21 days ago

In fact, after the RD-33 switched to electronic controls, it no longer produced black smoke (roughly 20 years ago).

keeganpoppen• 21 days ago

wow, this was a fantastic, fascinating read

coredog642• 21 days ago

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.

killjoywashere• 21 days ago

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.

cameldrv• 21 days ago

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.

Xixi• 21 days ago

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.

dgudkov• 21 days ago

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.

lonelyasacloud• 21 days ago

If there was ever a sector where the Chinese ability to cost effectively churn out good enough then drone applications are it.

Getting a handle on how nations are doing for jet powered drone is a bit tricky because of limited data available for what is primarily a military application. But, if we take model aircraft applications as proxy, then my understanding is that the Chinese company Swiwin (est. 2013) is already undercutting everyone else.

Barrin92• 21 days ago

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.

shalmanese• 21 days ago

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.

yourapostasy2• 21 days ago

...governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance...

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.

bluegatty2• 21 days ago

Massive stimulus spending, everyone in the country highly motivated and oriented around a communitarian / natonalist goal.

You can see it in ukraine right now - they are making drones in their basements in ways that no other country is.

These are hard things to factor into economics just as they are very real.

Undoubtedly some competition would help.

irjustin• 21 days ago

All the money and talent in the world...

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.

runako3• 21 days ago

The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem

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.

p_l3• 21 days ago

Condit would probably still set in motion the moves that enabled the rot - moving HQ, unrealistic targets for 7X7 (now known as 787), selling off portions of Boeing to skim just the cream at the top, and so on.

Not letting Boeing grab McDonnell-Douglas military projects might have stopped some of that, but it might have also accelerated it.

bsder• 20 days ago

The US's longstanding refusal to apply antiticompetition law causes a number of harms to consumers, entrepreneurs, and the stability of our economy.

It's worse than this.

The US Government had an actual goal to reduce the number of defense suppliers. And they succeeded at it.

Yeah, talk about an own goal ...

csomar3• 21 days ago

All the money and talent in the world can't replicate real users generating real data that you can use to improve

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.

rbanffy7• 21 days ago

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.

rvba• 21 days ago

Or good spies who steal the secrets + few years of subsidies to give runway for the new companies

roenxi2• 21 days ago

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.

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).

bluegatty2• 21 days ago

The free market works fine - the problem is at that scale, we can only afford a few key players, they're strategic so they end up having subsidies other considerations.

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.

js8• 21 days ago

So you think U.S. would be better at airplane manufacturing had Boeing gone bankrupt at some point in the past?

It's a pretty strong claim and I would like to see some theoretical justification, other than belief in the magical free market.

In my country, IIRC, we let Aero Vodochody to crash and be bought by Boeing. We are not better at making airplanes, honestly probably the worst than at any other point in history.

alexashka• 21 days ago

The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem

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.

netcan• 21 days ago

≥jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies.

A lot of the theoretical concepts behind this... They need updating to account for the last generation of experience. For the most part, the concepts were developed in the context of the industrial revolution(s) and manufacturing.

We are talking about manufacturing here, but the US economy in the last generation is a story about software, services, non-manufacturing firms and manufacturing firms the side step (as best they can) the core paradigm of manufacturing economics.

Competitive pricing, substitutes and alternatives, a strategic paradigm governed by market prices, marginal costs, and manufacturing quality... This is relatively marginal paradigm in the US economy, certainly in terms of market cap. In china, it is their bread and butter.

Low margin, highly competitive components manufacturing... Is that really a forte a free market societies in 2026? 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.

WillAdams• 21 days ago

That said, we're still running heavy presses:

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...)

wahern3• 21 days ago

I think a lot of the jet engine manufacturers are seeing this same corporate rot process, the number of high profile scandals across the industry and reports of insiders on how the number crunchers are taking over the business are strangely reminiscent of what we heard out of Boeing and Intel.

And there's the opening for China. The 90s and early 2000s saw alot of innovation by engine manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus built their planes around the next generation of engines coming out. But over the past 10 or so years all the major engine manufacturers decided to stop investing in new civilian engines and maximize their dividends on existing models. That's what killed the A380--the A380 engines are 90's tech, and all the engine manufacturers declined to build a new engine for an upgraded A380, not even one that utilized the current tech, and not even if Airbus backstopped potential losses.

So now is probably the best time since the 1980s for China to play catch-up. But the biggest problem is as you pointed out--engines and airframes are developed together, and both Airbus and Boeing also decided to stop new aircraft development and instead coast and reap dividends for the next decade or two, so there's no market for China to break into. There's still development happening in the defense space, but that's not a market open to China, either. Their only potential market is primarily domestic, and it's not capable of incentivizing and demanding dogged innovation in the same way the international market could.

mc322• 21 days ago

The A380 was killed for lack of demand as the airline industry changed. Boeing made the right bet.

In addition even if had been engine-centric there is no way there was enough market to dedicate R&D for a new engine for this limited market.

MichaelZuo2• 21 days ago

Modern high bypass jet engines are already pretty close to maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency, given realistic constraints such as weight, wing clearance, noise, and so on.

Even if all constraints were relaxed, the absolute limit might be another halving of fuel consumption. (with trillions of R&D)

And beyond that, there literally can never be jet engines significantly more efficient, until the end of the universe.

AnthonyMouse7• 21 days ago

governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.

The correct answer to this is to break up consolidated markets with antitrust. Are there only two airframe manufacturers left? Then chop them into smaller pieces so there are more. Reduce vertical integration so that it gets easier for new entrants to compete at any given part of the supply chain without needing to duplicate the entire thing themselves. Let each of the spin offs start with a non-exclusive license to the no longer existent parent company's technology so they all have the chance to iterate on it and compete for providing it.

And don't let them buy each other again.

notahacker6• 21 days ago

Problem with antitrust hammers is that once you've chopped Boeing into bits you don't end up with a competitive market with lots of new aircraft designs, you end up with a global Airbus monopoly on aircraft over 150 seats and the few surviving bits of Boeing competing to sell into its supply chain...

Airframers really aren't that vertically integrated as companies go. But it turns out the business of designing, certifying and selling an aircraft (and managing complex multinational supply chains) is hard, and airlines don't want 6 competing types of narrowbody in their fleet, they want one type of narrowbody in their fleet with an abundance of type-rated pilots, multiple maintenance options and a robust aftermarket.

Veedrac• 21 days ago

The simplest explanation is surely that China is new to having a highly educated workforce and the ‘failed for some fifty years’ claims the article makes don't mean much given it.

I don't think you need to entrain market arguments or whatnot to this, when it's only in the last decade China was a strong advanced manufacture player, and turbines are the kind of project that you probably wouldn't expect to go much faster than that regardless of the demand.

nradov11• 21 days ago

Exactly. Advanced turbine manufacturing is largely a chemistry and metallurgy problem. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution killed off China's intellectual capital so they had to start from scratch in 1976, and only really got moving in 1992. They've been way behind but will catch up eventually.

ragebol2• 21 days ago

I'd expect the competition for these companies to come in not from someone using the same technology, but a different technology that serves the same purpose. Eg. what happened to Kodak and Nokia.

For jet engines, the only thing that comes to mind is electric aircraft. No single-crystal turbine blades needed at all.

I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands.

EDIT: China has an extensive high-speed rail network. While those don't quite cover intercontinental flight, it is the sort of paradigm shift I mean.

notahacker6• 21 days ago

The problem with fully electric airliners is physics: to achieve useful range you either need batteries with energy density that seems unfeasible or some sort of power beaming infrastructure which has its own set of enormous challenges. So if Western turbofan manufacturers' moat lasts until electric aviation is ubiquitous, they can be very, very happy.

(Now sure, you can substitute electric aircraft with open rotor jet engines which require different institutional knowledge to modern high bypass turbofans, but they're still really sensitive to how the blades are manufactured)

Merad• 21 days ago

Serious electric aircraft are really gated behind major advancements in battery technology or some alternative power storage tech. The energy density of batteries is an order of magnitude less than fossil fuels, and you have to carry the heavy batteries with you the entire trip (vs burning off fuel as you fly).

restalis2• 20 days ago

"For jet engines, the only thing that comes to mind is electric aircraft. No single-crystal turbine blades needed at all. I may have picked a bad example, but the principle stands."

I understand the idea you wanted to convey and that commenting on the technical detail is not something we're supposed to do, but the technical side of your example is just too glaring to ignore. A people-carrying aircraft, be it of electric propulsion, or of other type, is heavy. Like, several tons (at minimum) heavy. To acquire the necessary portance, the aircraft has to be accelerated (on its inert wheels) on the runway up to the take-off speed and then to be able to hold the cruising speed, using engines capable of generating such thrust by only moving the air. That's a lot of force right there, and the engine that has to do this, will have to be pretty tough. Regardless of the fact that the source of the on-board energy is electric or not, that same air will have to be moved, somehow, at the needed speeds, and it will be by an engine that will look and work pretty much the same way the current jet engines do, since the shape is dictated by the aerodynamics and the internal design is given by the (air) fluid dynamics it has to work with. The single-crystal turbine blades are just an optimization. Weaker (regular fine-grained casting) materials can be used, but that will mean limiting the performance to lower tolerance levels (and most likely be heavier as well, to compensate for the lower mechanical strength).

nradov11• 21 days ago

Boom Supersonic is entering the turbine engine market using private funding (they have received some limited government contracts and tax incentives). It seems like the free market is responding pretty well, although they still might fail.

https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/aircraft-propulsion/b...

guywithahat• 21 days ago

That was my thought too. You can absolutely enter the industry, and big players do as the industry becomes profitable enough to sustain more competitors, it's just not available to the average person in the same way the average person can easily compete in the todo app industry.

philipallstar• 21 days ago

The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem, excess capital is taken out of these companies during good times and then they run to governments seeking bailouts during bad times

This isn't a free market problem. Companies move money out to avoid corporation tax, and government bailouts are what stop the free market from operating as it should.

DANmode2• 20 days ago

governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.

General Motors?

Could also try not giving them the money.

Forcing others to do better - or not exist.

bgnn• 20 days ago

As an engineer in semiconductors in the Netherlands, I hear from a lot of my friends working at ASML the typical red flags of the rot. They have a very thick middle management layer. Nobody feels like they are working at a high tech company with cutting edge solutions. I believe the customer support roles are very dynamic and satisfying.

yanhangyhy3• 21 days ago

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.

FooBarWidget2• 21 days ago

Furthermore we should thank the amount of fossil fuel and CO2 reduction that HSR has given, or the planet will be really in trouble.

inglor_cz6• 21 days ago

China has invested into high-speed rail for the same reason that Japan, France and Spain did: the big cities tend to be in the "sweet spot" distance of 250-750 km from one another, which is very comfortable to ride in a high-speed train.

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).

yanhangyhy3• 21 days ago

that's the result, not the reason

DiogenesKynikos2• 21 days ago

Beijing - Shanghai is about 1200 km. HSR has a 70% market share. The trip takes 4.5 hours.

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.

m0llusk2• 20 days ago

High speed rail in China is a disaster. Basic safety failings have led to repeated crashes and deaths. Confiscation of property on a massive scale has damaged government credibility. Trillions of dollars worth of investment is not paying off while depreciation does it's work. Prices have been cranked up, large numbers of workers have been fired, and the whole system is still deep in the red. The only solid good coming from Chinese high speed rail is the demonstration of how much damage out of control dictators can do to the bottom line.

maxglute4• 20 days ago

This delulu take. PRC HSR only had 1 disaster WenZhou, after which they shaped up and is functionally as safe as Japan, i.e. best in the world, more than euro operators, except on a magnitude larger network. Prices was kept flat literally for 10 years plus, after hike it is still far below inflation / wage increase. The whole system basically pays for itself in a few years on domestic fuel import savings alone, i.e. the aviation and freeing up slow rail from passenger to to freight which displaces diesel/trucking displaces like 1.5m barrels of oil PER DAY... ~50b+ per year in fuel cost alone never mind emissions avoided. It is objectively one of the highest ROI projects PRC has ever build, and stupendous bargain at 1T, which US overspends every 6 months on healthcare.

Like everyday US wastes on healthcare over OECD basline = enough $$$ for PRC to build like 300km of HSR, stations hardware and all. 1 week of US healthcare waste can build out entire Beijing to Shanghai route. Chinese HSR is best demonstration of why developmental dictatorship works.

yanhangyhy3• 20 days ago

know your Enemy dude

tzs• 21 days ago

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.

ifwinterco2• 21 days ago

If you want to sell commercial jets to anyone who isn’t Chinese, 20Y old engines aren’t good enough because modern engines are slightly more fuel efficient.

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

FooBarWidget2• 21 days ago

What from I understand the issue is mainly service frequency rather than fuel efficiency.

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.

ralph84• 21 days ago

The GEnx which powers the 787 is a 20 year-old engine design. There are thousands of jets flying around with 40+ year-old engine designs, especially in operations like charter and cargo where the aircraft spends more time on the ground than in the air. At the right price a 20 year-old design would be quite viable. Which indicates China is much more than a decade behind.

stephen_g• 21 days ago

The difference isn’t huge (I think it’s 10-20% or something)

A 10-20% reduction in fuel burn is actually considered pretty huge...

rasz• 21 days ago

For cruise missiles couple hour blade operating life is also a non problem.

shykes• 21 days ago

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.

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.

bruce5112• 21 days ago

But interestingly their ambitions are "local". This has a large impact on the machines and materials required.

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.

mohamedkoubaa• 21 days ago

Given a generous enough definition of "defensive", maybe

Cthulhu_2• 21 days ago

This is the part I don't understand about chip export restrictions; the argument used is that high-end chips would be used for high-tech weaponry, but most weapons don't need high-end chips, 2-5 generations old chips are good enough for most smart weapons. I mean the Tomahawk is from '83, the HIMARS from the late 90's, etc. I don't believe that high end, small process chips are used in any weapons right now.

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.

wahern3• 21 days ago

Weapons systems like the Tomahawk and HIMARS are continually evolved, especially the electronic systems like navigation and command+control. The iteration isn't nearly as fast as in other industries, but the modern incarnations are not 30+ years old, AFAIU, old stockpile notwithstanding.

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.

Spooky233• 21 days ago

They do spying to understand the capabilities of allies and adversary weapons. The goal is to maintain supremacy and slow down development. The US had a spy in the Soviet era that provided the entire Soviet radar roadmap into the 1990s, and technology was deployed (or not) based on that.

That’s one of the reasons drones are so disruptive. The development cycle is tuned by state of the art missile and stuff, and isn’t tooled for some dude strapping a mortar round to a little drone.

KylerAce• 20 days ago

There are uses for AI running on the platform, you can see this in Ukraine right now where many kamikaze drones use AI for terminal guidance if the connection to the operator breaks after a target has been selected. How intensive that workload is and how it needs to be however I can't say.

antonkochubey• 21 days ago

they have excellent air defenses

in which conflicts have those air defenses proven themselves?

class3shock2• 21 days ago

It's kinda opposite in a way. More countries make military engines than commercial engines because military engines don't have to worry as much about efficiency, pollution, sound, and most importantly cost.

But unless you massively subsidize a company "cough Rolls Royce cough" then you can't compete at all with a generation or two behind commercial jet engine tech.

KennyBlanken• 21 days ago

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...

3245t345f345g3• 21 days ago

If she'd been wearing her seatbelt, she would likely be alive today.

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.

dwd• 21 days ago

Shrapnel is an issue, and depends what it takes out.

Take this incident for example:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

yread• 21 days ago

Nacelle is designed to contain blades, but a failed blade can break downstream parts and nothing can stop high-pressure turbine disk parts from flying where they want

agurk• 21 days ago

As with all design on aircraft, weight is a key part of the specification. A nacelle that could contain all possible failure modes would be too heavy to fly.

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-...

vasvir• 21 days ago

This is not my understanding by reading the article. The blade failure will destroy the plane if developed independently of the rest. So modern nacelles will contain the blast as you say but they have decades of integration testing together with the blades in all kind of conditions.

if you develop everything anew there will be mismatches in tolerances and thousands of potential individual failure risks that can be combined in interesting, unexpected and fatal ways.

deterministic• 21 days ago

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.

dilawar• 21 days ago

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?

zuzululu3• 21 days ago

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.

JSR_FDED2• 21 days ago

China has an incredible engineering culture. If you think their meteoric rise is accomplished without being able to share opinions or facts you’re very much mistaken.

To imply they lack “individual integrity and honesty” is misinformed, deluded, and likely racist.

zuzululu3• 21 days ago

reaching for racism over what is an obvious gap in cultural and political environment is just lazy

if China has such incredible engineering culture where are the jet engines? semiconductors ?

xiaodai• 21 days ago

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.

totetsu• 21 days ago

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...

trhway• 21 days ago

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.

jimnotgym• 21 days ago

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

khurs2• 21 days ago

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?

15155• 21 days ago

No. They do this of course, but with jet turbines the materials science and processes aren't deducible from the work product.

HNisCIS• 21 days ago

The manufacturing is really deeply gnarly. Like crazy materials you'd have to reverse engineer the production process for, then reverse engineer how to form the blades so they'll survive insane loads for thousands of hours of operation without failure under extreme temperatures. It's like saying you can make a MacBook chassis because you have a block of aluminum, some hand files, and an Adderall prescription.

eunos• 21 days ago

Chinese firms already manufacture parts of Rolls Royce engine. I think Wuxi Turbine is one example

otherme123• 21 days ago

Alegedlly they tried, but Airbus didn't fall for it. Search for "Ghost plane Airbus A320 C919" if you want to expand. It is a case of "we have no proof, but we have no doubt": China buys a bunch of A320, one of them disappears and never flies. After some time, a A320 clone C919 appears on their market.

khurs2• 21 days ago

Well at least they bought and didn't rent for 6 weeks, dismantle, reassemble and return....

https://qz.com/1146259/mercedes-got-caught-trashing-a-rental...

maxglute4• 21 days ago

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.

CrzyLngPwd• 21 days ago

..Yet.

csomar3• 21 days ago

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."

noir_lord• 21 days ago

Almost everyone at the top of the CCP has an engineering background.

So yeah their five year plans are indeed often “Invest in science/engineering”, they are an interesting country.

csomar3• 21 days ago

Is that really that interesting? Imagine giving a bunch of tech nerds some funds and freedom to do whatever. The end result will be software/tech (whether the product is useful is actually another story).

insane_dreamer2• 21 days ago

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).

russli19933• 21 days ago

Chinese solar technology is multiple generations ahead of US companies. First solar panels have a conversion rate of 17% while longi is 24.8% and demonstrating 26%. First solar should be out of the market without US government subsidies and protectionism.

insane_dreamer2• 20 days ago

sure, now it is 20 years later; but my point was about how the Chinese co's got started (basically, IP theft because US companies located production in China)

lenkite2• 21 days ago

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.

Alpha3031• 21 days ago

Do you mean WS-19? It gives 2023 as the production date for WS-15, which is in the past.

lenkite2• 21 days ago

By going live, I meant when WS-15 is integrated with J-20 rolled-out in a fully-operational and mature manner. This is expected to substantially close the gap with top U.S. fighters in raw propulsion performance.

IndeanCondor• 21 days ago

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.

pohl• 21 days ago

Counterpoint: modern fighters need higher-performance engines not just for thrust but also to run and cool more and more electronics. Arguably both are underpowered from where they need to be.

leonidasrup5• 21 days ago

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...

Zigurd3• 21 days ago

This plus subsidizing R&D via military contracts is how jet engines for passenger aircraft remain a US and European pursuit.

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.

leonidasrup5• 21 days ago

I would not bet against China. All the R&D done in US and Europe could be done also in China, but R&D takes time.

Lot technological development in China in the last two decades was result of US and European companies outsourcing manufacturing to China and most importantly, sharing know-how with Chinese companies.

I recommend the book "How China Captured Apple" by Patrick McGee

https://www.thewirechina.com/2025/05/25/patrick-mcgee-on-how...

This outsourcing development path for jet engines in China is not possible because ITAR.

Spooky233• 21 days ago

The good news for China is we fired or reassigned most of the counterespionage agents to chase gardeners, so lots of technology transfer is happening.

jmyeet• 21 days ago

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.

Theodores• 21 days ago

At the start of WW2, the UK was struggling to make enough planes the hand-crafted, coach built way. A deal was done for US automotive concerns, notably Ford, to make British planes under license, en-masse.

Note that this was to be done without Weingarten and other German presses, which were the EUV machines of the era. This was also to be done without the 'Black Country', which was the British industrial heartland centred around Birmingham.

A big problem turned out to be the British blueprints, which were ill-suited to precision mass manufacturing, where fettling is not allowed. Everything had to be redesigned for mass manufacturing.

This redesign for mass manufacturing was evidently outside of the competencies of the Brits but an easy task for the guys at Ford.

Until 2014, China and Russia have genuinely sought trade and cooperation with the West. The deal was hydrocarbons and labour in exchange for luxury goodies, specialist machine tools, avionics and much else, including jet engines. It was win-win, mostly.

However, in 2022 the gloves truly came off. Economic cooperation between Russia and China became necessary. Thus far, there is no evidence of Chinese war material on the front line, other than dual use items seen on both sides such as the ubiquitous DJI Mavic drones. However, there is a deeper partnership going on between the two nations, with aerospace being extremely important.

Already Rolls Royce are making gas turbines in China, for non-plane things. Naturally they hold back the true trade secrets, and the US government absolutely makes sure that is the case. However, you know it is only a matter of time before there are several Shenzhens for aerospace growing like mushrooms in China, blueprints from Russia, re-engineered for mass production.

mschuster91• 21 days ago

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.

DiogenesKynikos2• 21 days ago

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.

pixelesque• 21 days ago

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.

amelius2• 21 days ago

If they can build rocket engines they can build jet engines.

null_shift2• 20 days ago

Jet engines are significantly more complex. You don’t know whah you are talking about.

amelius2• 19 days ago

Fewer moving parts != simpler.

bigcat12345678• 21 days ago

... 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 ...

Giorgi• 21 days ago

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.

kaizenite• 21 days ago

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

usefulcat• 21 days ago

Veritasium made an episode not long ago describing the design and manufacture of turbine blades:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM

alfiedotwtf• 21 days ago

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

redwood• 21 days ago

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

class3shock2• 21 days ago

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).

projektfu• 21 days ago

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.

satonakamoto• 21 days ago

A key question in assessing China’s development of indigenous turbofan engines for commercial aviation is the addressable market.

In the near term, it is highly unlikely that Chinese-made engines would be adopted by Boeing or Airbus, given certification barriers, supply chain integration challenges, and broader geopolitical considerations. As a result, the primary initial market would be China’s domestic commercial aircraft programs.

However, the scale and timing of that demand remain uncertain. Early production volumes for programs such as the C919 are relatively limited, and initial fleet sizes alone may not be sufficient to amortize the substantial research and development costs associated with modern turbofan engines. This raises questions about the commercial viability of such programs in the absence of broader international adoption.

China’s civil aviation industry is still in a relatively early stage of development. The C919, its first domestically developed narrow-body jet, has completed test flights and entered initial service with Chinese airlines. At present, it relies on engines supplied by GE. A critical milestone for the program is obtaining international airworthiness certification, particularly from U.S. and European regulators, which would enable broader global operations and improve export prospects.

If such certifications are achieved, potential demand may emerge from developing markets, including Southeast Asia and parts of Africa. Nevertheless, penetration into North American and European airline fleets would likely remain limited for the foreseeable future, even if existing Western-supplied engines continue to be used.

Recent export control measures—such as U.S. restrictions on the sale of certain engine technologies—highlight the extent to which geopolitical factors can influence supply chains in the aerospace sector. These constraints have, at times, affected delivery schedules for aircraft programs like the C919.

In this context, China’s push to develop indigenous engine capabilities can be understood as a strategic response to external dependencies. Similar dynamics have been observed in other high-technology sectors, including semiconductors and advanced computing hardware, where supply chain resilience and technological self-sufficiency have become increasingly important policy objectives.

owenversteeg• 20 days ago

This, like the linked article by the same author ("America Doesn't Have the Stomach for Growth") raises a few interesting points but doesn't have a strong central thesis. If I could summarize this article, the main thrusts are 1) it's too technically complex, 2) the margins are thin, 3) there are strong regulatory requirements, and 4) opportunity cost vs. AI and chips. Anyone that knows Chinese modern manufacturing knows that is an incredibly weak argument overall.

On technical complexity, China _has_ a more technically complex engine, totally domestic! The WS-15 is a _more_ difficult engine to make. It runs hotter, has an afterburner and variable nozzle... and it is made virtually entirely domestically; yes, including the turbine blades that the author wastes two pages reassuring you only the West can make.

On thin margins... this is laughable. The CCP loves to subsidize strategically industries in six million ways and it is _really_ good at it. Way better than any Western government. Talk about efficient use of gov't money, the CCP will get you high quality engineers, raw materials, a captive market, whatever you need. Negative margins do not bother them one iota.

On strong regulatory requirements... China has a massive domestic market, a physically large country and several strong allies / client states. International requirements are irrelevant to start and once they have proven performance in their markets they can get them anyway.

On opportunity costs... this is the least weak of the arguments. I would argue that 1) China has enough top talent to go around, 2) even in a post-AI world jet engines are useful, and 3) it's clearly a priority of Xi Jinping and thus this whole discussion is irrelevant. That said, there is something to this argument and I would be interested to read a political/strategic analysis on this topic.

Overall, this and Aakash's other articles seem like starting with a conclusion then grasping at random factoids to defend it. If I might give advice to the author: try writing with a strong central thesis.

foldr6• 20 days ago

The WS-15 is impressive, but it’s on a par with the jet engine technology available to the US military in ~2005. No-one doubts that China can make functioning jet engines. The question is how long the West can maintain the technical lead that it still does have.

maxglute4• 19 days ago

WS15 matches western on raw power, i.e. comparable thrust to f119/f135 (f22/f35). PRC cores lacks CMC which was last (2000s) western hot section revolution, but that's more about efficiency ~10-20% better range. We don't know WS15 maintenance/metallurgical gap - no one really knows if their service/overhaul hours, but even if heresay assumption 30-50% lifepsan, that's something PRC industrial output can circumvent, i.e. simply building 2-3x more engines and iterate/improve. CMC fuel efficiency huge, but issue 20% doesn't buy F35s enough range/endurance in westpac theatre size without tanking in many scenarios etc. PRC gets around that by just making J20 chonky boi with massive internal fuel, worked around efficiency from systems perspective.

rurban• 20 days ago

The F-35’s many operational issues are public because of a Western engineering culture that prioritizes shared learning. China has no equivalent. It has nothing like our annual Pentagon reports.

Well, that's not true. I've worked in engine testing, in all countries, and the Chinese shared more than anyone else. We had a huge wiki, and Chinese shared the most, the Koreans and Japanese the least. It might be that they were the worst in speaking English, but the culture was also much stricter. The only ones who worked by shouting. I've not heard much about much shouting in China, just African-style delays. Which is gone by now for sure

Why jet engines aren't made in China

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