Why jet engines aren't made in China

> 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.

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

Take this incident for example:

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

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.

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?

Outdated copium TBH.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.