Why jet engines aren't made in China

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• Hacker News
• 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.

  by trhway
• > 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.

  by dgudkov
• 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.

  by Lerc
• > 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.

  by tzs
• 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.

  by ivell
• 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...

  by leonidasrup
• 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.
  by justincarter
• 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.

  by shalmanese