> 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.
If you want to sell commercial jets to anyone who isn’t Chinese, 20Y old engines aren’t good enough because modern engines are slightly more fuel efficient.
The difference isn’t huge (I think it’s 10-20% or something), but when fuel is your main cost that’s enough to make older engines undesirable
The GEnx which powers the 787 is a 20 year-old engine design. There are thousands of jets flying around with 40+ year-old engine designs, especially in operations like charter and cargo where the aircraft spends more time on the ground than in the air. At the right price a 20 year-old design would be quite viable. Which indicates China is much more than a decade behind.
I mean, the "right price" for a 15 year old 787 (with a fresh new set of life limited parts and maintenance checks) is around a third of the cost of a new one and they're now starting to be parted out for their components (newer 787s have updated GEnx engines with better fuel economy, which is a big part of their higher value). And Boeing reckoned they needed to sell 1100 units to break even on the programme, which is a lot aircraft to sell if your design is only competitive with 15 year old aircraft airlines are trying to get rid of. People are already starting to breaking up old 787s for scrap because there are more buyers for spares than old 787s...
China may or may not be much more than a decade behind in their engine technology, but there's no commercial case for designing a new aircraft with engine variants so outdated they wipe >$100m off the sticker price of the aircraft....
Indeed, a 10%-20% difference is so much that airliners would sell their grandmother (if they had one) for a leap like that. A 2% improvement is considered significant and is a massive economic incentive, even more so these days for long-haul flights which are now in some cases 50% longer due to conflicts, and at times extreme price hikes for jet fuel.
(This applies a bit less to military engines though, where performance is a more important factor. Fuel efficiency is still important though)
Yes I think eventually they will catch up because the Chinese domestic market is big enough to give them a market while they iterate.
With petrol/diesel engines they just gave up and went straight to electric, but there's no viable alternative to jet engines for planes, so they'll put in the work (plus the military incentive running in parallel)
No, but regional aviation can be well served by electrification - a jet engine needs to run at a speed it pushed enough air through itself to propel the plane forward, but a turbine feeding a generator that powers a couple electric motors can run at a far more forgiving regime.
As pointed out elsewhere, all it might take is a paradigm shift to unseat the current incumbents.
> 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.
You seem to believe that China's military ambitions are purely defensive, but that is not the case. They have grandiose expansionist ambitions which include basically the entire South China Sea - which in spite of its name is shared by many countries. Not to mention their explicit goal of eventually conquering Taiwan. Their military doctrine is fundamentally offensive and does require air power.
But interestingly their ambitions are "local". This has a large impact on the machines and materials required.
In other words, let's says the Chinese military jet engine is 15 years behind is say fuel economy. Which reduces range. If the conflict is local that doesn't matter overmuch.
Equally operating from land, not carriers, reduces reach, but if what you want to reach is local then that doesn't matter.
If China has military ambitions (and despite the sabre rattling there's no overt indication of that), they are all in a specific area.
By contrast the US likes to participate in, or instigate, actions far from home. Moving planes means long open-ocean ferry flights. Single-engine reliability, range, effeciency and so on is paramout.
Equally the US relies on friendly local countries to provide support bases, logistics, fuel and so on. As evidenced just this year, that support can be withdrawn. Will Japan or Korea want to be dragged into a US / China conflict over Taiwan?
So if the Chinese are operating engines later than the first gulf War, and on par with the second, I'm not sure that's a defining difference.
The US doctrine of air-defence suppression followed by air superiority may not be possible in a space near the Chinese mainland.
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 means more flight hours on station.
So while the engines play a part in a hypothetical conflict, supply lines (and the length thereof) play (I think) a larger part.
I think you vastly underestimate how maintenance requirements impact how rapidly you can bring forces to the fight and how long you can keep them there. While that is exacerbated by long supply lines, it is an extremely important factor in any combat scenario.
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.
Supercruise matters directly for BVR combat. It means that you can get high and fast to launch your missiles with the best parameters without burning half your fuel via afterburners. (Many fighter jets would burn through all their fuel in under 10 minutes at full afterburner.)
Maintenance hours are sure to matter in a real war where equipment is getting destroyed and supply lines are being disrupted.
This is the part I don't understand about chip export restrictions; the argument used is that high-end chips would be used for high-tech weaponry, but most weapons don't need high-end chips, 2-5 generations old chips are good enough for most smart weapons. I mean the Tomahawk is from '83, the HIMARS from the late 90's, etc. I don't believe that high end, small process chips are used in any weapons right now.
The only use case is modern day AI workloads, but that's used more in planning than in the field. I can imagine a use case for e.g. image recognition, but again, that tech or the level required is not new at all and doesn't need state of the art chip tech.
Weapons systems like the Tomahawk and HIMARS are continually evolved, especially the electronic systems like navigation and command+control. The iteration isn't nearly as fast as in other industries, but the modern incarnations are not 30+ years old, AFAIU, old stockpile notwithstanding.
That's also why they're so damned expensive, and why it's difficult for upstarts to break into the market with cheaper alternatives. Like any tech company, once they get the customer locked into a platform they're constantly pushing upgrades to both stay technologically competitive and, more importantly, keep their margins high.
They do spying to understand the capabilities of allies and adversary weapons. The goal is to maintain supremacy and slow down development. The US had a spy in the Soviet era that provided the entire Soviet radar roadmap into the 1990s, and technology was deployed (or not) based on that.
That’s one of the reasons drones are so disruptive. The development cycle is tuned by state of the art missile and stuff, and isn’t tooled for some dude strapping a mortar round to a little drone.
There are uses for AI running on the platform, you can see this in Ukraine right now where many kamikaze drones use AI for terminal guidance if the connection to the operator breaks after a target has been selected. How intensive that workload is and how it needs to be however I can't say.
It's kinda opposite in a way. More countries make military engines than commercial engines because military engines don't have to worry as much about efficiency, pollution, sound, and most importantly cost.
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.
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.