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Why jet engines aren't made in China

aakash.substack.com

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Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#191

Post by AnthonyMouse »

shalmanese wrote: post #74

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.…

> 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.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#192

Post by AnthonyMouse »

p_l wrote: post #134
runako wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Except that if it accelerated it then there would still be an independent McDonnel-Douglas to pick up the slack by getting into the passenger airliner business, and in turn the possibility of that would keep pressure on Boeing to clean up their act.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#193

Post by mwigdahl »

inglor_cz wrote: post #127
dingaling wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ballpoint pen was invented in 1938. It doesn't rely on any arcane manufacturing technology.

I am 47 and ballpoint pens have visibly improved since the 1990s, at least the cheap ones (never had an expensive one). The risk of accidental staining is by now basically zero, it used to be high enough that you avoided putting a pen into your shirt pocket even for an hour.

Hence the fading away of the "nerd with pocket protector" stereotype...

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#194

Post by coderenegade »

rbanffy wrote: post #119
usernametaken29 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 r…

The philosophy in aerospace is more to build a better engine rather than to have more engines, and this extends to every aspect of aircraft design. Engines are already built to contain catastrophic failure, and the planes themselves remain functional for all but the most extreme situations. We're at the point where essentially every lost aircraft is a compound failure, with significant human factors contributing to the event. It's likely that we're on the pareto front of what engineering can reasonably accomplish, and the only gains in safety either barely nudge the needle of what we would notice (better materials, say), or difficult for the market to accept (removing pilots altogether).

Aerospace RND has been looking into hybrid propulsion systems for a long time. If there's one thing they aren't shy about pushing, it's the ability to go higher, faster, more efficiently. Such systems aren't used because they aren't yet good enough.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#196

Post by Grombobulous »

labcomputer wrote: post #73
Grombobulous wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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... ... 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…

China is winning contracts to build out HSR in other countries. It’s not just about land sovereignty within China. CRRC has won construction contracts in multiple countries in Europe and Asia. When you build more high speed rail miles than the rest of the world combined, you tend to know what you’re doing.

I will point out, the #3 top selling vehicle in the UK is a Chinese SUV with a gasoline engine (Jaecoo 7).

I think the idea that China just can’t make a reasonably competitive ICE vehicle is another outdated notion about China.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#197

Post by Spooky23 »

leonidasrup wrote: post #142

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-g…

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.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#198

Post by bluegatty »

yourapostasy wrote: post #77
shalmanese wrote: post #74

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.…

> ...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 equival…

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.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#199

Post by Spooky23 »

bruce511 wrote: post #169
foldr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a military context, the main technological gaps relating to jet engines are supercruise and maintenance hours. Both are potentially quite relevant in a ‘local’ conflict.

I'm not sure about maintenance hours. That matters as a function of proximity to maintenance staff, parts, new supply and so on. Flying from home bases, with no shortage of skilled labor can cover that. Supercruise also matters a bit less when the distance to combat is shorter. Less fuel expended on "getting there" is more fuel for "on station". Plus, assuming more-or-less unlimited supply of machines and pilots mean…

It matters for combat readiness.

The F-35, which was optimized for congressional district employment, has an effective 25% readiness rate (another 25% can fly but not fight), which is half of the 40 year old F-15C and 1/3 the newer F-15s.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#200

Post by AnthonyMouse »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #39
justincarter wrote: post #27

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 entr…

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…

> 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.

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