China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane
popsci.com
popsci.com
Getting access to a 20-ton thrust high-bypass turbofan design is a huge step for them.
Lest you think I would only throw stones at my former employer, Airbus has been doing that and more. They are actually doing final assembly in China.
Obviously if China wants to buy one the fact that they want to reverse engineer its technology is going to be patently obvious.
Even if China could get a hold of an AN-225 reverse engineering one is a huge task, and at best you only know exactly what this hardware did, not what they avoided, or good ideas they didn't pursue purely due to resource constraints etc.
So what happens instead is that a state like China approaches the Ukraine for a manufacturing agreement like the one described in the article. China hands over a lot of money which covers not just the planes but also the tech, and job are created in the Ukraine as a result.
This is why it's easy to lose the ability to produce something e.g. the big rockets that NASA used to make.
China can make a copy of the engine but it would not gain sufficient insight into why they chosen to design it exactly as it did so making adjustments would not be very easy or possible at all without putting almost as much R&D effort into it as making a whole new engine from scratch and debugging things would also be near impossible.
There is a reason why there are only a few engine manufacturers in the world, it's very hard work, and as far as big engines go then only RR and GE are really in the game.
IIRC, to avoid this when they shut down F-22 production, they crated a huge number of DVDs documenting every step of the manufacturing process, so that knowledge wouldn't be totally lost.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/june-2015-online/jewel-...
Also cool to hear them talking about automating as much stuff as possible to remove human error. Incidentally that's also how we go about software release processes where I work.
Nit-pick, but single crystals can (and do) still have defects. Your point about single crystal turbine blades being awesome I agree with completely though :)
China has the luxury of being able to play catch up by purchasing technology. Why spend the next 20 years trying to develop it when you can pay Ukraine who already has the expertise/product and probably gave the Chinese a deal. It's just smart business.
China apparently did something similar with BMW. They bought a BMW factory in Brazil (I think) for a couple of billion and disassembled it piece by piece and moved it to China. It saved them years of figuring out the how to of high tech auto engine manufacturing.
Link to Story:
Designing and building modern turbofan engines is incredibly dependent on your mastery of materials science and fabrication. These are areas of science and engineering that are notoriously "art like" or even "black magic like". The accrued knowledge that sits in Rolls-Royce or GE or Pratt-Witney don't really exist in textbooks, and they aren't taught in classes either. This knowledge and know how was generated over 60 years of trial and error, and are jealously guarded, not just by the manufacturers, but also by their governments.
Things to consider: modern turbine blades are already pushing the absolute edge of lightweight-temperature resistant materials. And then modern designs will run these blades at temperatures that are nominally above the material failure point, because we've come up with ways to cool the structures. Oh, and the temperature resistant alloys in use? Secret. Empirically determined, and likely unique.
Once you get into materials and fabrication, having a finished example to examine is rarely going to lead to a big win. If the secret sauce is in the fabrication (HOW do you make a single crystal blade? HOW do you inflate corrugated titanium? HOW do get this type of grain structure with this nickel-iron-manganese mix? HOW do you get a laser weld in this impossible again?), then a single example isn't -THAT- useful.
Reversing engineering a modern turbofan(remember, the basic principles of turbofans are well known) is more akin to reverse engineering Intel's fab process by peaking at a finished i7 (with AFM and electron microscopes) than reverse engineering say... a sensor fusion module once you get the assembly code.
Which is why the technology transfer associated with the engine deal is a big deal. It should (I mean, its possible that the terms are all fucked up) give the Chinese an oppourtunity to learn all of these hows and whys (albeit for a slightly dated design, but still a relatively modern one).
Similar to razor blades and little balls that go into writing pens. Few companies can make them well. China has to import little balls from Japan (at least for high quality pens).
Sending over work instructions will help (somewhat). China will need veterans of the process to work with local Chinese vendors, explaining how to do each step.
The Ukrainian staff will resist handing over their work babies. Also, the subcontractors (heat treaters, metal workers) will not hand over their secret sauce.
China will figure it out eventually. This will help. Still many years away from mastering it though. They will have to source from Ukraine for quite a while.
In the field of fluid and thermodynamics? Probably quite a bit. This is why I tried to emphasize the materials and fabrication bit.
I think the Soviet Union physically based a good chunk of its military industry in Ukraine, which the country then inherited when it became independent. So when we talk about Ukraine in this context, we're talking about a former superpower.
For example, several current models of Russian helicopters and military ships rely on engines made only in Ukraine, and the recent conflict and disruption of the military industrial complex (which used to and still is rather connected between Ukraine and Russia) has caused delays in producing these craft since you can't really replicate it easily, it takes a lot of time, skill and effort.
Also, lots of military rocket manufacture (from shoulder-operated to very large SAM) was and is located in Ukraine. Together with their rather large nuclear industry (currently civilian, but they used to manufacture warheads as well, plus the missile and guidance systems) they probably could be a first-rate nuclear power with MIRV ICBMs if there was a political will to make it so again.
What was the writer thinking? My readers won't understand what 250 tons is, so I'll use imperial metrics, too? Net effect is that this only makes full sense to those who understand both metric and imperial units.
(I think a pound is 454 grams ('easy' to remember because that's the unit most jam is sold in in the EU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King...). That would make 300,000 pounds about 135,000 kg or 135 tons, so it carries about double what a C17 can carry)
It's equivalent to saying "Mt Everest is nearly 6 miles, or 29,000 feet, high."
Edit: Oops, I just saw the previous response. That's what happens when you open 8 tabs and read as you can.
Makes sense it would be confusing to people on the metric system, but I doubt he thought twice about it.
A C17 can carry 170,900 pounds so it carries 339,000 lbs more approx.
Reminds me of one of my high school geograph teachers who gave the length of the Grand Canyon in miles and the width in km because he couldn't do the conversion.
Might as well tell us how much more payload it has than a Cessna 172
There are very few militaries in the world that can routinely operate on a large scale a long way from their home bases. The US can and does. Russia can do it with difficulty. Britain can do it on a small scale. Beyond that, few armies have the logistics capability. China is gearing up to join the club.
There's also the PLA Navy's aircraft carrier program, which is progressing slowly. They have one refurbished USSR aircraft carrier in commission for training purposes, and two ramp-type carriers under construction.
This doesn't seem to be the PLA's big effort, though. Most of their new weapon systems are for sea dominance in China's coastal waters, broadly defined.
It's interesting to reflect that the previous "world's largest plane," and still the one with the widest wingspan, dates from WWII. In a sense this reflects changing social priorities, and in another sense it may reflect a generalized form of Conway's law: giant aircraft are produced by giant monolithic bureaucracies brooking no dissent, like countries in wartime or totalitarian governments.
If that's the case, maybe we'll see more such planes if the wars in Syria and other places continue to spread, pushing countries like the US and the EU powers onto more of a wartime footing. But it's not clear they'll be strategically beneficial for fighting in the Drone Age; they're too hard to build and too easy to destroy.
There's also hundreds of 747s that could be pressed into service (or just utilized) in a world gone to hell scenario.
I suppose I could have more clearly stated that I was arguing that the US is already leaning on large aircraft strategically, it wouldn't be a shift.
It seems likely that the current war, if it really takes off, is going to be more significant than WWII. In WWII, major parts of Earth were not battlefields: the Americas, Antarctica, Australia, most of Africa, India, Mongolia, Siberia, parts of China, and orbit were spared. And there were no nuclear weapons on the table until the end of the war, and no precision-guided munitions at all anywhere.
It seems like this war, if not stopped quickly, could lead to the end of territorial monopolies on force, and thus geopolitics as we know it. What will it look like? Both the war and its aftermath are literally unimaginable. We can't even say it'll be better or worse than WWII — precision-guided munitions mean there's no more need to expensively Dresden a city to destroy its industrial infrastructure, but it also means you could be killed without warning at any moment because an IA misinterpreted your Facebook status or your cellphone metadata, like Malik Jalal.
Interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 173
Differing versions of such a statement are attributed to conversations as early as 1948 (e.g. The Rotarian, 72 (6), June 1948, p. 9: "I don't know. But I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. They'll use rocks!"). Another variant ("I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones") is attributed to an unidentified letter to Harry S. Truman in "The culture of Einstein" by Alex Johnson, MSNBC, (18 April 2005). However, prior to 1948 very similar quotes were attributed in various articles to an unnamed army lieutenant, as discussed at Quote Investigator : "The Futuristic Weapons of WW3 Are Unknown, But WW4 Will Be Fought With Stones and Spears". The earliest found was from “Quote and Unquote: Raising ‘Alarmist’ Cry Brings a Winchell Reply” by Walter Winchell, in the Wisconsin State Journal (23 September 1946), p. 6, Col. 3. In this article Winchell wrote:
Joe Laitin reports that reporters at Bikini were questioning an army lieutenant about what weapons would be used in the next war.
“I dunno,” he said, “but in the war after the next war, sure as Hell, they’ll be using spears!”
It seems plausible, therefore, that Einstein may have been quoting or paraphrasing an expression which he had heard or read elsewhere.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
See also http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/16/future-weapons/
Why would the Soviet's independently develop a highly flawed project? This article does a decent job answering that: http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a9763/did-the-...
It's rammed with fantastic photos by Ralph Mirebs of the hangers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome used to house it (complete with an ageing, abandoned Buran inside).
Probably a few reasons:
* At the point of starting Shuttle operations, the flaws of the design weren't as apparent, especially not to general public.
* Even though it LOOKS similar, it's actually not all that similar in design. The main difference is that it doesn't actually carry engines (which are the most expensive and problematic part of Shuttle due to their planned reuse) - Buran was taken into orbit by an expendable Energia rocket, which "solved" the problems with expensive engine rebuilds and testing.
* At the end of the day, Buran never got past the prototype stage. It flew a single mission (empty, fully automated), landed and was then shelved. Only two prototypes were ever built.
A shuttle actually works fairly well at around 1/5 the size. Lower thermal stress means no tiles. It would have a single ideally swappable engine large on board fuel and no external fuel tank. Still needs SRB's but those actually work fairly well.
I think they did do satellite maintenance from the shuttle a few times, most notably on the Hubble telescope.
The Airforce also helped drive the payload (weight and dimension) requirements, but I feel that this is secondary to the cross-range requirement.
As I'm sure you know, the USA actually has an operational tiny "shuttle". But for others here, I wanted to link to it, because it's cute. It looks just like a baby shuttle.
I put the word "shuttle" in quotes, because it's actually not a shuttle, but an unmanned reusable orbital spy spaceplane. Or is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
http://phys.org/news/2016-05-super-secret-x-37b-space-plane-...
You can infer something from phrases like "flying super heavy cargos" and "by bringing infrastructure ... that are normally too big for airlift" but it would be interesting to see if anyone has something to add directly on that topic as to what exactly the drawbacks to that scale are. The fact that only one was ever made also implies that the uses are limited.
So by those rough guesses, the AN-225 should be ok.
That said, the moment you have a too heavy, or too big load for an AN-124, then the extra fuel cost of the AN-225 has almost infinite value.
The drawbacks to scale always have to do with complexity, and ground infrastructure. The AN-225 can't operate from as wide a variety of fields that the AN-124 can (though this shouldn't be a huge concern from commercial use).
Structurally, the modifications from the AN-124 to AN-225 aren't super complex. They basically added plugs before and after the wings to extend the fuselage, and added a wing extension. While these aren't trivial changes to an aircraft, they're basically the simplest type of structural change you can make. Oh, I guess there's a tail modification, but that's not that risky either.
I mean I guess the point is that you probaly would not want a whole-scale replacement of AN-124 class lifters with AN-225, but keeping a few around enables entire types of lifts (and therefore operations) that simply aren't possible. The key would be to estimate what the appropriate amount of AN-225 are.
For an example, the famous Beluga Airbus enables a form of manufacturing distribution (for good or for bad) that simply isn't possible without it existing. You would never want a giant fleet of Beluga, but having it is invaluable.
Take the following paragraph, for example:
> For China, the An-225 would open whole new frontiers in commercial and military air transportation. A fleet of civilian An-225s could quickly ship heavy and bulky cargoes of massive scale, ranging from construction equipment to consumer goods. For humanitarian purposes, the An-225 could support disaster relief operations, able to fly in not just large amounts of aid, but also by bringing infrastructure like power generation and water treatment that are normally too big for airlift.
That spells out in plain language why possession of the An-225 and its technologies make economic sense for China. And the paragraph after that state the military reasons why China would need the An-225.
If the plane were economical for general cargo lift they would have made more than one.
1. You can carry huge tanks (instead of several smaller ones), including ones that were NOT intended for that, meaning you can surprise an enemy by deploying some weird weapon where he doesn't expect.
2. You can carry trains, and then use those to carry the rest.
3. You can carry other airplanes, for example if you end in a war of attrition and need to crank out planes as fast as possible, it might be an interesting idea to make them even far from the front, and ferry the plane parts to the front (then assemble there, and use them).
4. And most interestingly, it can carry gigantic parts of whatever you need, warship propellers, munition factory machinery, and so on...
It is tempting to think it would be interesting to use as bomber or paratrooper plane, deploying a huge amount of bombs in the same place and levelling it completely... but this would be a terrible idea, a plane that big is probably a huge target, people would attempt to shoot at it even with small arms, and it is not impossible to get lucky with them (happened at least once in Iraq War for example, when a random farmer downed a US helicopter right on the start of the war with his hunting rifle... the chance of it working was tiny, the rifle didn't even had the range to ever reach the helicopter, but somehow, it did...)
I expect this is desired for a few reasons - heavy military airlift, to match what the US has had since Vietnam with the C-5 Galaxy. Access to licensed construction of the D-18 engine (as mentioned by ovi256). And ego.
Saturn-5, one of the biggest rockets so far in the world, was manufactured near a river and transported by a big ship. This sidestepped the problem of roads.
Energiya, the Soviet heavy rocket which launched Buran, had its huge second stage flown by a plane to Baykonur.
In 1960-s, USSR was looking for a good solution to this problem. They considered building a huge canal to use ships; they were thinking about using an aircraft; they played with an idea of building an exceptional - biggest in the world, if I'm not mistaken - automobile to carry it over desert. Eventually they decided to build rocket near the launch complex - that's the reason N-1 has the unusual shape.
Today, SpaceX keeps lengthening Falcon-9 modules - but it can't make them wider, because existing roads won't allow it. Long stages have their share of problems - they could be less efficient by mass, they could have unwanted dynamic characteristics - imagine a long thin-walled container pushed from behind through the atmosphere, it way vibrate...
In short, just the rocket industry of the world alone - that's currently about under hundred launches per year - could provide the market for big planes. At least this is a possible option.
As you see, fuel economy is somewhat worse compared to that Boeing.
I don’t think the main problem is size or weight. I think the main one is age. AN-255 is 30 years old, Boeing 747-8 is 6. That’s almost 25 year or progress in aerodynamics and engines development.
It's not just the size, it's also the shape of such airlifters that makes them non-economical for commercial use.
For example the USAF's own data shows that the C-17 burns more fuel per hour than the KC-10 but carries 20 tonnes less payload by weight, all because of the fat rear-loading-for-tanks fuselage ( that's seldom used for such ) and thick wing.
Both the C-17 and the C-5 were touted on the civil market but had zero uptake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy
(I think the typical reader will have little intuition for the cargo capacity of the C-17, so the more instructive comparison looks at the most capable operational US plane.)
Also note that (according to Wikipedia) the capacity is 250,000kg - so 275 tons, or 551,155 lbs.
The C-17's cargo capacity (again, from Wikipedia) is 77,500kg - so 85 tons, or 170,858lbs. That looks a lot more like a difference of 380,000lbs than 300,000lbs to me, which, with some journalistic licence, could surely become "almost 400,000lbs more". You may well be correct about the sensationalism aspect, and here they are leaving some of that on the table.
So I don't really know what's going on. Like I said, functionally innumerate... (Though of course, calculation error at this end is always a possibility! But nobody's paying me to do this, so I'm going to go with my gut here.)
http://www.avionale.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Lockheed_...
c5 Galaxy is massive.
Interestingly, Boeing 747-8F is even bigger, heavier, and carries more load.
Antonov 225?
Well, it can carry the same load as both of those planes combined, which really put things into perspective.
250 tons = 227 tonnes (227,000 kg)
300,000 lbs = 136 tonnes
Why the second figure wasn't just given as 150 tons I have no idea.
(My initial complaint was just with the units mismatch. But, as is often the case, this is just the tip of the iceberg. My rule of thumb remains in force: any time an article mixes up metric/imperial/US Customary units, you can basically ignore that part of it.)
The problem is that these are Soviet planes and with the current Russian-Ukrainian relations in shambles, the production has stopped. Much of avionics and those turbofans are (were?) made in Russia: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/ukraines-antonov-will-weste...
In my view, this is just thrashing in a frantic bid to keep the company alive. Sad, given its storied past.
It was propaganda to make the US military look weak and ineffective - the same kind of propaganda that let us watch a split screen of al-Sahhaf's press conference saying the US hadn't taken Baghdad airport and US forces strolling around its tarmac.
"...a plane that big is probably a huge target, people would attempt to shoot at it even with small arms, and it is not impossible to get lucky with them (happened at least once in Iraq War for example, when a random farmer downed a US helicopter right on the start of the war with his hunting rifle... the chance of it working was tiny, the rifle didn't even had the range to ever reach the helicopter, but somehow, it did..."
I expect a scientific publication to not popularize the misuse of 'exponential'.
It's not enough to have the original manufacturer survive... Can Rocketdyne manufacture another F-1 today? So it's quite possible - though not certain - that Motor Sich wouldn't be able to create a unique enough engine, even if it did that in the past.
1. http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5083/why-china-wants-to...
The US Space Shuttle program only ever did glide testing of the orbiter off the back of the 747 carrier. A real launch of an orbital vehicle off the back of an AN-225 would mean serious envelope pushing and would be putting an extremely expensive aircraft at risk every time.
> Oops! Something went wrong. Please scroll down to find your content.
> "China buying and building An-225s would exponentially increase its power capabilities not just in Asia, but across the world."
If you have an overseas VPN, you'll be able to see this article, or do a Google News search for something like "China AN-225" for other articles on the topic.
There are Grease Monkey scripts to stop the redirect or use a proxy, it's too much work for me to bother reading their content.