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Why jet engines aren't made in China
- ivell 4mo agoThis 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.
- dmitrygr 4mo agoMaterial 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114
- didntknowyou 4mo agorecently? and you posted an almost 10yo article?
- dmitrygr 4mo agoyes, compared to the length of time ballpoint pens have existed (88 years -- since 1938), this is very recent - only 9 years ago
- dzhiurgis 4mo agoCan 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoThe RR video showing manual assembly of wax molds is a low volume development line. It isn't their main production process.
- tedd4u 4mo agoI've seen that video. Guaranteed they wouldn't have put the slightest bit of information in there if they thought would help the competition.
- notahacker 4mo agoThey can order engines from RR or P&W But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)
- ivell 4mo agoSeems they have figured out the single crystal blade tech https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-crystal-superalloy-jet-engine https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-crystal-...
- akiselev 4mo agoFrom the article: > DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost. US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials. The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.
- IHateAcronyms 4mo agoTFA = The Featured Article/The F**ing Article
- kergonath 4mo agoThe word is "fucking". We’re grown-ups, we can use grown-up words.
- azan_ 4mo agoIsn'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/ https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/
- wmf 4mo agoQuantity isn't quality.
- azan_ 4mo agoIsn't having universities in global top10 actual quality?
- SecretDreams 4mo agoWhere are the jet engines?
- azan_ 4mo agoIn the making I'm sure. It's really naive to think that jet engine is challenge that won't be overcome.
- litbear2022 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Y-20#Specifications_(Y-20B) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Y-20#Specifications_(Y...
- queenkjuul 4mo agoIn the J-20Bs
- tom8ow 4mo ago[flagged]
- OneDonOne 4mo ago[dead]
- TFNA 4mo agoYou 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.
- 8note 4mo agois it really a tired meme? its a clear prioritzation choice from the government, and that prioritization is itself a technology notably this same prioritization mode resulted in the soviet union failing to produce quality of life improvements for its citizens. the failure is that the CCP is unable to prioritize making simple useful stuff
- TFNA 4mo agoHave you been to urban China anytime after that 2017 article? The country is now as developed as anywhere else, indeed it feels like it is gradually overtaking other developed countries. The comparison to the Soviet Union feels ridiculous to anyone with a firsthand experience of the country.
- jurgenburgen 4mo agoThe political push in the US to cling to legacy fossil fuel technologies feels to me more Soviet-like if anything.
- cpursley 4mo agoNot really, the Soviets pushed all sorts of new transportation and energy generation ideas, not to mention nuclear.
- BigTTYGothGF 4mo agoWhat country do you live in, and are they currently capable of making ballpoints?
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- OneDonOne 4mo agoIt 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-China-managed-to-make-ballpoint-pens 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.
- margalabargala 4mo agoThey are not microscopic! I can easily see the balls in the tips of ballpoint pens.
- jurgenburgen 4mo agoThe BBC article even mentions that they are milliscopic, not microscopic. > 2.3-millimetre
- OneDonOne 4mo agoThe ball is not microscopic, but the tolerances required to make the ball spherical and fit into the socket are.
- margalabargala 4mo agoExactly, so this sentence is incorrect: > Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets
- OneDonOne 4mo agoYes indeed, you are correct. My mistake.
- dingaling 4mo ago
- NitpickLawyer 4mo agoIt'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.
- selimthegrim 4mo agoThis is of course exemplified by the joke - what's the famous Soviet machine that cuts wood into two pieces? One that cuts wood into three pieces.
- Grombobulous 4mo agoI 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.
- SecretDreams 4mo 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.
- toast0 4mo agoChinese automakers do (or did) make ICE and hybrid cars, too. I suspect it's wouldn't have been good strategy to try to build those cars for the US, CA or EU markets. An ICE engine is relatively straightforward, but hitting emissions and fuel efficiency targets is complex. [1] And the future of ICE cars, especially in those markets, is limited... why build out emissions expertise, when you can get your foot in the door with EVs? [1] I recently bought a 1981 VW Vanagon which I try to maintain. That's a perfect time period to see how emissions control forces engine design. My engine has fuel injection and EGR, but a few years back has the same engine block with a carburetor; california emissions uses the same engine, but adds electronic ignition and an o2 sensor in the exhaust for closed loop injection control. A couple years later and they added water cooling. Every so often emissions and efficiency standards got harder to meet and you have to do more stuff.
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- seanmcdirmid 4mo agoMaterial 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 4mo 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
- tptacek 4mo agoDoes Russia do it at comparable yield at the same quality level? India can do single crystal turbine blades too, but at a small scale.
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- seanmcdirmid 4mo agoCheap AND high performance. There is a reason Russian passenger jets are often engined with western jet turbines even though Russia makes their own.
- vkazanov 4mo agoOne more factor: Similar to how this works in semiconductors, some things are just too expensive to build without having an economy of scale.
- Scramblejams 4mo agoI doubt that very much. 20ish years ago I read about the Indians being very upset that the engines in the Sukhoi fighters they bought weren't even making it to the promised (very modest) 300 operating hours between overhauls. That's far less than Western engines routinely achieve. And with the hollowing out of the Russian industrial base that's occurred since then, I'd be surprised if it's gotten any better in the intervening years.
- torginus 4mo agoIt 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_shift 4mo agoAs someone in the industry it is amusing to watch HN do some cursory googling and then make definitive statements with confidence.
- hbd-investor 4mo ago[flagged]
- dang 4mo agoCan you please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines? You broke quite a few of them with this post. You're welcome to express your views thoughtfully, but not aggressively. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- Lerc 4mo agoWhile 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 4mo 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.
- bluGill 4mo agoCertainly 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.
- queenkjuul 4mo agoLosing a war to Iran doesn't indicate anything to you?
- TulliusCicero 4mo ago
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- HardCodedBias 4mo agoA 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).
- russli1993 4mo agoWS 15 is already shipping with latest J20, its trust to weight ratio is above 10.
- justincarter 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoIs aviation encumbered with patents like software development is?
- colechristensen 4mo agoFor 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.
- yourapostasy 4mo ago> ...whereas aerospace patents are more legitimately about hardware that indeed took years and millions to develop and optimize. Something that leaps out at me reading through semiconductor and aerospace patents is a noticeable fraction of them are basically saying, "hey, <non-obvious process understanding that pushes our limits of comprehension of physics required> to achieve some desired effect was found to be useful, but it consumed <years and millions to develop and optimize> because it was such a convoluted journey filled with zillions of dead ends, so we want a patent on that because the end result only looks obvious in hindsight". I don't see as much of this in software at this time, though I suspect it may change in the future.
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- anonreeeeplor 4mo ago[dead]
- dv35z 4mo agoYou can read about China's modern carrier-based, stealth fighter here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35 There is a section about its engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35#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 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 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 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_Fujian 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdCNAUjuRI
- linzhangrun 4mo agoIn fact, after the RD-33 switched to electronic controls, it no longer produced black smoke (roughly 20 years ago).
- keeganpoppen 4mo agowow, this was a fantastic, fascinating read
- coredog64 4mo agoFor 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 4mo agoThere 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 4mo agoThere 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 4mo agoJet 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 4mo 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 4mo agoIf 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 4mo agothe 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 4mo agoThe 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.
- yourapostasy 4mo 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.
- bluegatty 4mo agoMassive 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.
- yanhangyhy 4mo agoThis 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.
- FooBarWidget 4mo agoFurthermore we should thank the amount of fossil fuel and CO2 reduction that HSR has given, or the planet will be really in trouble.
- maxglute 4mo ago[dead]
- tzs 4mo 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.
- ifwinterco 4mo agoIf 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
- FooBarWidget 4mo agoWhat 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.
- ifwinterco 4mo agoYes I think eventually they will catch up because the Chinese domestic market is big enough to give them a market while they iterate. With petrol/diesel engines they just gave up and went straight to electric, but there's no viable alternative to jet engines for planes, so they'll put in the work (plus the military incentive running in parallel)
- rbanffy 4mo ago> no viable alternative to jet engines for planes No, but regional aviation can be well served by electrification - a jet engine needs to run at a speed it pushed enough air through itself to propel the plane forward, but a turbine feeding a generator that powers a couple electric motors can run at a far more forgiving regime. As pointed out elsewhere, all it might take is a paradigm shift to unseat the current incumbents.
- KennyBlanken 4mo 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=j973645y5AA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcALjMJbAvU 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 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...
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- 3245t345f345g3 4mo 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/aircraft-accident-reports/AAR19-03.pdf 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.
- deterministic 4mo agoCherry-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 4mo agometa: 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?
- zuzululu 4mo agothe 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_FDED 4mo agoChina 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.
- zuzululu 4mo agoreaching 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 ?
- JSR_FDED 4mo agoTwo weeks ago I took the high speed train to Shenzhen, which was better than any domestic flight in the US. Then I had a drone deliver an iced tea. I took a driverless taxi to get there. The roads were incredibly quiet and the air quality was excellent because almost all cars and motorcycles are electric. World’s first small modular reactor goes live in a few months. The Huawei Ascend GPUs aren’t at Nvidia level, but they’re still allowing the Chinese models to be within a few months of frontier labs, with the gap closing with every new model release. They have no EUV capabilities yet, but neither does the US because that comes from the Netherlands. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word racist. But in the same way that stupidity and evil look very similar, so do racism and ignorance.
- zuzululu 4mo ago
- xiaodai 4mo agoAssuming 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 4mo agothis 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-revelation https://www.decouple.media/p/the-gas-turbine-the-final-revel...
- trhway 4mo agoRussia 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 4mo agoMeta. 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
- khurs 4mo agoThis 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 4mo agoNo. They do this of course, but with jet turbines the materials science and processes aren't deducible from the work product.
- HNisCIS 4mo agoThe 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 4mo agoChinese firms already manufacture parts of Rolls Royce engine. I think Wuxi Turbine is one example
- otherme123 4mo agoAlegedlly 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.
- khurs 4mo agoWell 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-tesla-model-x https://qz.com/1146259/mercedes-got-caught-trashing-a-rental...
- maxglute 4mo agoOutdated 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 4mo ago..Yet.
- csomar 4mo agoThe 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 4mo agoAlmost 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.
- csomar 4mo agoIs 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_dreamer 4mo agoanother 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).
- russli1993 4mo agoChinese 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_dreamer 4mo agosure, 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)
- lenkite 4mo 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 4mo agoDo you mean WS-19? It gives 2023 as the production date for WS-15, which is in the past.
- lenkite 4mo agoBy 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 4mo agoProbably 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 4mo agoCounterpoint: 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.
- leonidasrup 4mo agoJet 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-regulations-aerospace-parts-manufacturers/ https://precisionam.com/articles/precision-machining/itar-re... https://aircraft.zone/navigating-the-rules-a-guide-to-u-s-export-regulations-for-civil-aircraft-parts/ https://aircraft.zone/navigating-the-rules-a-guide-to-u-s-ex...
- Spooky23 4mo agoThe good news for China is we fired or reassigned most of the counterespionage agents to chase gardeners, so lots of technology transfer is happening.
- Zigurd 4mo agoThis 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.
- leonidasrup 4mo agoI 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-china-captured-apple/ 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.
- jmyeet 4mo agoThis 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 4mo agoAt 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.
- eunos 4mo ago[dead]
- mschuster91 4mo 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.
- DiogenesKynikos 4mo agoThe 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.
- CurbStomper 4mo ago[dead]
- pixelesque 4mo agoMinor nitpick: Rolls-Royce military jet engines are made at Bristol (ex-Bristol Aerospace), but civilian turbines like the Trent series are made in Derby.
- amelius 4mo agoIf they can build rocket engines they can build jet engines.
- null_shift 4mo agoJet engines are significantly more complex. You don’t know whah you are talking about.
- amelius 4mo agoFewer moving parts != simpler.
- bigcat12345678 4mo 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 ...
- baybal2 4mo ago[dead]
- jingpostmedia 4mo ago[flagged]
- Giorgi 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoVeritasium made an episode not long ago describing the design and manufacture of turbine blades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM
- alfiedotwtf 4mo 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 4mo agoVery 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
- class3shock 4mo agoJust 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 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoA 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 4mo agoThis, 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.
- rurban 4mo 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
- tom8ow 4mo ago[flagged]