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.
Why jet engines aren't made in China
221–230 of 342 posts
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even in our "productivity at any cost" society, sometimes people still study things that they find interesting. That's probably a good thing, in the long run.
Scale matters, and there are aftereffects on the society as a whole. Historically, societies which produced a lot of ideologically minded professionals (such as clergy), tended towards implementing that ideology top-down. I am on board with Turchin's theory of elite overproduction here, and gender studies is modern equivalent of catechism. To choose a less ideological example: personally, I love Egyptology, but I wou…
> Chances are that the superfluous graduates would push for an Egyptocentric department in every public institution and half of private ones.
Better that than, say, the business school.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#223I 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
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The reason MDD was merged into Boeing is MDD was in the process of failing: the MD10 was completely outdated, the MD11 was not competitive, and with the Cold War ending the infinite money tap of military projects was closing (it was already quite a ways there, the last supper was in 1993, by the time of the MDD merger half the major contractors were gone)
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#225The 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.…
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.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have 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.
The political push in the US to cling to legacy fossil fuel technologies feels to me more Soviet-like if anything.
Not really, the Soviets pushed all sorts of new transportation and energy generation ideas, not to mention nuclear.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#227Veritasium made an episode not long ago describing the design and manufacture of turbine blades:
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#228The 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.…
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 rai…
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)
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#229The 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.…
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...
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#230The 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 themselve…
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.