241–250 of 342 posts
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
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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 j…
I know electric aircraft are not quite feasible on the same scale as airlines.
On the other hand, China has an extensive high-speed rail network for inland travel. OI have no idea how often the Chine fly inside the country vs how often they use aircraft, but this is the sort of different technology for the same purpose I mean.
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Lol. Do you think todays aircraft are not designed with the idea that the engine can fail? And if you have unreliable components do you think redundancy is going to save you? And lets be real - there already exist a aerospace arena where you have a higher number of CAT-events - it's called the military. And they deal with it by having a parachute for each passenger.. No - in effect building jet-engines (that are comm…
> Do you think todays aircraft are not designed with the idea that the engine can fail? Of course they are - but the engines are also designed to be extremely reliable, and that's why you get away with two engines on long flights over water, something previously only available for planes with four engines. > No - in effect building jet-engines (that are commercially viable i.e. fuel and efficeny) is not a easy to dis…
> 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…
But unless you massively subsidize a company "cough Rolls Royce cough" then you can't compete at all with a generation or two behind commercial jet engine tech.
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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)
Basically, allowing it to merge with its largest competitor was the worst possible outcome for competitiveness and long-term health of the industry.
More to my point, though. There's no real reason our existing anticompetition laws should not have been enforced here. Our culture of selective enforcement of laws is a cancer that manifests in all kinds of negative ways. I strongly advocate that we move towards being a society governed by written laws.
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> 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. And there's the opening for China. The 90s and early 2000s saw alot of innovation by engine manufacturers. Boeing and Airbu…
Modern high bypass jet engines are already pretty close to maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency, given realistic constraints such as weight, wing clearance, noise, and so on. Even if all constraints were relaxed, the absolute limit might be another halving of fuel consumption. (with trillions of R&D) And beyond that, there literally can never be jet engines significantly more efficient, until the end of the univ…
the 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.
To imply they lack “individual integrity and honesty” is misinformed, deluded, and likely racist.