China is desperately attempting to build its own jet engines at the minute. They’ve been doing this for decades to now, and will be doing it for many more. And will always be one or two decades behind the west it seems. That’s the takeaway from this piece at least.
The reason is a perfect storm of factors where they’re enormously complicated to design, manufacture and maintain. The market for them is not that huge either, even if you could somehow figure out how to produce them and sell them at a discount. And all this is low margin where airlines are extremely cutthroat so very few are going to take a chance on an upstart.
So how does someone break into the field? I guess if you go by recent history you look to China who’ve broken into and taken over all manner of fields. Take auto for example where 10 years ago very few in the west would have heard of a Chinese brand but now they’re plentiful on many European roads. Unthinkable. They did this by not copying directly the old model, but instead ploughing ahead to new ground in electric cars where old manufacturers were loathe to do anything about. Clean ground, clean design, open field. And it worked.
Catching up directly is difficult. Go the shorter route where the incumbent can’t or won’t go. Classic disruption theory.
So what with jets then? Much of me thinks the only way here is for them to do something different. Maybe it is electric like the others where they start with short hop travel in smaller ones and work up to something bigger over time. The physics is against scaling that too much. Maybe stick a jet turbine for power instead of direct propulsion to drive the electric motors? A hybrid aircraft.
But on the other side too is open grass where supersonic travel is absent any real players. Maybe Boom though they’ve a lot stacked against them. A well funded niche manufacturer could get a long way here before any real competition showed up. Then work down the range to the normal aircraft.