China's First Jet to Rival Boeing and Airbus Is Helped by U.S. Technology | Hacker News Reader

China's First Jet to Rival Boeing and Airbus Is Helped by U.S. Technology

bloomberg.com

39 pointswslh48 comments

This will be interesting to see if western airlines or middle eastern airlines buy any of these planes. My guess is they will probably rely on the chinese central banks to give cushy loans to developing nations to build out their air fleets and to chinese airlines as well to build up enough demand to sustain. China could go the route of helping regional airlines in Africa for instance get the planes they otherwise couldn't afford (with chinese construction firms getting the contracts to rebuild the local airports, and other infrastructure).

"Comac...had orders and commitments from 23 buyers for 570 aircraft as of November 2016. Other than...[GE], all are from local companies. China Eastern Airlines Corp. ... will be the first carrier to take delivery."

China is by far the largest aviation market in the world. They don't need other markets to succeed. If they can replace Boeing and Airbus with their home-made airplanes, that is a huge success. According to research, China needs more than $1 trillion worth of airplanes in the coming decade. That is HUGE.

Expect the Chinese state to create a very friendly environment for those domestic planes.

Did it in other markets, currently under way against the iPhone.

Airbus and Boeing are toast in China.

They did it against Google, Facebook, and Youtube as well.

As a 3rd party observer with no stake in either the US or China, I wonder how the USA would react if China was the #1 in the world economically, and exporting Facebook, Boeing, etc. I imagine we'd see some American protectionism.

The WTO was created to prevent these shenanigans. Europe and US play ball, mostly. EU/NAFTA/CETA/TTIP all part of that leveling of the playing field.

China does not play ball, at all. Literally don't give a shit about the Wests opinions or approaches to deals. Perceived in the West as cheating, but that is just a cultural viewpoint.

China is #1 in the world economically, and exports Baidu [1], WeChat [2], etc. Baidu has had a Silicon Valley presence for years, and Tencent, WeChat's parent, opened one last week.

WeChat could be a real threat to Google and Facebook. It's comprehensive; you can do messaging, banking, shopping, and taxi calling from inside WeChat. It has sub-applications for other services. It's a post-desktop world. Google and Facebook came from desktops and crammed down to phones; WeChat was born mobile.

[1] http://www.baidu.com/ [2] http://www.wechat.com/en/

I think it's possible that the culture barrier during the initial days of social networks might have been the cause here. Cultures/aesthetics/languages are different and so platforms that serve as "one size fits all" (not localizing their layout and options) might not be able to compete with more local options at this scale.

What about Huawei? Huawei was banned from entering US telecom infrastructure market [0].

[0] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/22/huawei-well-re-enter-us-marke...

Euhm. Not to blow your bubble, but the US is extremely flexible and open economically. Far more so than any other country on the planet.

Europe is pretty inflexible, compared to the US. E.g. there is no free market for most agricultural products in the EU. And before you say it, no this is not due to US meats having hormones in them. Firstly, those taxes and rules apply to everything, whether or not produced with EU rule compliance, and secondly, there isn't even a free market within the EU for many products (e.g. wine in France. Olive oil (or other oils) in Southern Europe, ...). And of course, the EU is certainly not neutral when it comes to other products as well, e.g. Boeing vs Airbus.

China is extremely INflexible and hostile to free trade, even today. VERY few commodities trade freely with China, even just taking the published import tariffs and conditions.

Add to that that the Chinese state famously owns pretty much every large Chinese corporation (state owned enterprises) and it's influence and restrictions over what products are welcome in China goes above and beyond the officially published rules.

So I believe a fair assumption would be that no, the US would not object too much to large Chinese companies being successful in the US. In fact, I do believe there's large scale examples of that if you search just a little bit.

For a practical example of the US allowing large non-US businesses to operate freely in the US, even where it hurts local industry, you only need to look at the steel industry.

To me, that fact used to seem simply protectionism, but honestly it's very reasonable.

Google and Facebook in particular are a security agencies dream - people volunteering to share messages, location, what they're reading, who they're friends with, etc - that a rational country would be afraid of from even friendly nations.

Airbus and Boeing will do just fine in China selling widebodies (and probably continue to sell A320/737s in somewhat smaller numbers too unless the C919 turns out to be an exceptional aircraft as opposed to a half-decent aircraft with subsidised purchase cost)

I think you can add Furniture and Solar Panel markets too... really India should be large enough to make some of the same plays fostering domestic industry too, but they either don't do it as much or you don't hear about it as much in US media.

They don't need other markets to succeed.

They don't "need" those markets but they want them. It will help to solidify China's position as the third superpower.

There are incentives for those African nations to help this happen as well. Beyond the local benefits of increased commerce, they are thinking about negotiating better rates for their natural resources than they currently receive from the west.

Boeing and Airbus want those markets as well. They don't want them any less than China does.

They want them just as much but don't have nearly as much to offer in return.

Boeing and Airbus have higher costs, though. They can't pay Chinese wages.

Serious question. What is the second superpower? EU?

The USSR was the second superpower. The USSR no longer exists and there isn't currently a second superpower but I think of it like spouses.

If you're married and divorced twice, when you marry again you may have only one spouse but that is your third spouse.

So does that make England the 0th superpower and maybe France the -1st? ;)

China led the world for a long time way before the superpower concept was even a thing. It fell behind only recently since the 1st Industrial Revolution started.

It really depends on how you define "superpower". There isn't any country that can project force the way the US can.

The EU certainly has the technology to be a military superpower, and a few member countries have relatively powerful land and air forces, but the Europeans don't have the logistics capability they'd need to fight a major war outside Europe, and their collective navy isn't very strong.

Although the article mentions that many parts were bought under contracts from foreign companies (making "US technology" appear in the title), I wonder how many domestic parts were built using stolen trade secrets and intellectual property.

Maybe some. But if China wants to fly their aircraft in Europe or the US they need to get it past the FAA and European equivalent. The main benefit of all those US-based components, with regard to this, is that those components are largely COTS or COTS+barely bespoke and are already certified or in a state where the changes can be quickly certified.

Novel aircraft systems require a lot of effort to get approval from the FAA to fly. There's little benefit here unless you're also stealing/faking that paperwork.

And to add to this, if a jet crashes and it's discovered that the equipment is forged (as it may likely be examined by the documented OEM resulting in some WTFs flying around in a lab somewhere) the FAA will ground the entire fleet. They would then have to re-equip the aircraft with certified electronics and possibly re-certify everything. I'd be willing to bet that in that situation, any aircraft that was owned locally would either be sold back to china/someone else who wouldn't care or scrapped costing everyone a metric shit ton of money

Initially, I doubt China would attempt this. Avionics and control systems (the only stuff worth cloning) are hard and this is just a first flight. Over time, you may see some domestic shops open up and start supplying low cost equipment as an option on production jets, but all of this tech will have to clear certification to fly anywhere in the west. I imagine various governments will probably give them a hard time in order to protect their own production lines.

FWIW, China actually did exactly this with the Comac ARJ21 - the "smaller, regional jet" already flying that was mentioned in this article. Most groups outside China believe that the ARJ21 is produced using some manufacturing tooling that was left in China after McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) ended an early 90s program to produce MD80/MD90 series aircraft in China. It's been reported that some early plans for the airplane were actually copies of McDonnell Douglas plans with the logo changed.

China, of course, denies this, but the ARJ21 is very similar in design to many McDonnell Douglas aircraft.

You bring up a good point. During the cold war, the soviet union had a lot of success just copying western airframes. While at this point A320/B737/C919 class aircraft using traditional construction have reached a design consensus, it'll be interesting to see what happens if they try composites.

Yeah, and it could also be interesting to see if they can quickly acclimate to more advanced technology. Back when the C919 launched, I read some speculation that it was built from stolen A320 plans - the dimensions are suspiciously similar. At least as I understand it, though, the current consensus is that they simply copied the size because the 320 proved the market for a plane of, more or less, exactly that size.

If they can do something similar with composites - learn from/reverse engineer Airbus and Boeing composite designs, but not genuinely steal plans - they might be able to skip a fair amount of the extreme pain with composites A and B have had over the past decade.

See Concordski

Ok, maybe "success" was the wrong word to use ;)

Edit: for the uninitiated, the Tu-144 was a bit of deathtrap. While it made some interesting improvements to the original design, it had numerous problems due to less advanced Soviet manufacturing.

The Soviets copied the B-29 and ... what else? The DC-3 was made under license so hardly counts as copying.

Many of their aircraft had similar configurations to Western equivalents but different design aspects. Just like 707 and DC-8 in the West.

On the other hand China literally copied Soviet types after the Sino-Soviet split. Tu-26, MiG-21, An-24, An-12 were all reversed engineered without tooling.

To name a few notable ones beyond the B-29:

Tu-144, Tu-160, Buran and Yak-38

Of course, we don't know for sure what happened with these. It's unlikely they were cloned the same way the B-29 was (rivet for rivet) but they were very likely products of the espionage environment at the time.

A lot. As in they've been targeting Boeing, Airbus, etc for a long time now. It's still a lot of work though, even after you've stolen the information. The ability to create modern manufacturing capabilities is a lot harder to steal.

British did it to the Chinese many decades earlier of course. Darjeeling tea was mostly developed by stealing the highly coveted tea secrets from China. Decades before that, America was able to greatly advance its industrial capability by stealing secrets from the UK.

"Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage" covers this pretty well. Also goes into Chinese telecom hardware that was completely stolen from Cisco, bugs and all.

https://www.amazon.com/Cyberspies-History-Surveillance-Hacki...

The audio book is well read: http://www.audible.com/pd/History/Cyberspies-Audiobook/B01FV...

It'll be interesting to see if they can get their first generation of airliners off the ground and operating profitably quickly enough to embrace the coming wave of next generation composite aircraft. The C919 looks to be almost entirely traditional aluminum construction but the future of transport aircraft is looking to be increasingly based on carbon composites. The problem is that the industrial processes and supply chains for aluminum vs composite aircraft are extremely dissimilar. China however may have an edge here in the future as composites are still very labor intensive to construct.

What's the difference between Boeing, Airbus, or Comac?

Boeing and Airbus:

-Are owned by shareholders all over the world(including China!)[1]

-Assemble planes all over the world(including China!)[2][3]

-Have employees all over the world (including China!)[4]

-Use parts made all over the world (including China!) [5][6]

Moreover, trade is always equal[7]. If the US sends China $100 of corn and China sends back $100 of plane, who cares?

------

[1]http://www.cfr.org/united-states/quarterly-update-foreign-ow...

[2]https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-identifies-site-for-chin...

[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/airbus-china-factory-a320-201...

[4]https://jobs.boeing.com/location/china-jobs/185/1814991/2

[5]http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2005-06-02-Boeing-787-Highlights...

[6]http://www.businessinsider.com/graphic-boeing-787-dreamliner...

[7]You may have heard of a "trade deficit". Well, is China sending the US $100 in products and not ask for anything in return? If so, that would obviously be amazing for the US and foolish for China (free stuff!). The truth is that instead of purchasing $100 in products to send back to China, China instead decides to purchase $100 of investment stuff in the USA, and will take the future returns that investment provides them. An example: China sends $100 of plane, takes that $100 and builds a $100 apartment building in the USA. It then takes $5 of profits a year back to China in corn, and then sells the building in 30 years for (now a larger amount) of $200 in corn.

Despite the globalised nature of aviation supply chains, expect to see the nearly all the C919s operate within the Chinese market (with most of the rest being developing countries in Asia). The real difference is decades of experience, development, reputation and global maintenance programme setup behind the Boeing/Airbus series, and most operators looking to acquire new aircraft won't overlook that in favour of slightly lower capital costs without a lot of encouragement and support network that's very close to their home base.

1. US government is preventing Chinese acquisition of both US and foreign companies. [1] 2. Boeing's assembly line in China is Boeing's only oversea factory. All planes assembled in China are for the Chinese market. [2] 3. US laws forbid the State Department issuing me US visas with valid period longer than 12 months because I did high performance computing during PhD (studying parallel computing is not a crime!). Last time when I worked for a major US company, I had to spend months to get clearance to have access to some stupid patent data which is 200% intended for immediate public use. 4. US bans a long list of parts/components to be sold to Chinese/Chinese companies. For example, some public Chinese universities (e.g. BUAA) which have project fundings from the Chinese government are not even allowed to buy DELL desktop computers! US bans AMD from selling its high end GPU to the Chinese government, even when AMD's high end GPU is help designed in Shanghai by a large team of Chinese engineers [3][4].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-02/obama-sai... [2] http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/boeing... [3] https://www.pcgamesn.com/AMD-Vega-design-complete [4] http://wccftech.com/us-government-bans-intel-nvidia-amd-chip...

> Moreover, trade is always equal[7]. If the US sends China $100 of corn and China sends back $100 of plane, who cares?

That's just narrow-minded economic dogma, and economics is very far from a complete theory of humanity.

For a illustrative example of why it's too simplistic, consider this: people with weapons can coerce people without into bad trade deals. Aircraft production is more of a weapon-making skill than agriculture. If China has the weapon-making skills and the US loses them due to dogma-driven trade specialization, a future China (overtaken by some racist ideology, for instance) could conquer and destroy the US. There are political, military, and other reasons why someone should care about the specifics of what they're trading.

I wonder when we will move away from the current plane designs, they all look the same for decades now! I think a change like the one in automotive industry in the last century would be welcome. I'd personally love to see some more 'edgy' shapes with less curves (ala F-117).

There's a reason the F-117 is the only airframe that looks like that. It had the aerodynamic efficiency of a brick. The fact is, current airliners have reached a balance of a number of factors resulting in them all looking the same.

Ever wonder why the old DC10 style tri-jets went out of favor? Too hard to maintain the tail engine.

Concorde? Burned too much fuel, excessively high landing speed/distance (11,800 ft 0_o) because of it's short wings needed for supersonic flight.

Why are there no flying wing B-2 style airliners like Popular Science prophetizes about every few years? Nowhere to put windows. Also, tubes lend themselves better to the pressurization cycles that airliners experience.

The fact is, it turns out given current market constraints the optimal design is two engines, tube fuselage, narrow swept wings. Style has absolutely no influence over the economics of airline operation.

The F117 is an inherently unstable aircraft, which is why it's also maneuverable. Passenger planes are designed to be dynamically and statically stable, they're harder to stall, easier to recover from a stall, are not prone to stall spins, etc.

Whether the main wing or the horizontal stabilizer stalls first, the plane is recoverable (including with a failed powerplant). That's not a given with other designs. As soon as you go with a candard design, you have to ensure the canard always stalls first or you've got an unrecoverability problem.

Existing designs are less complex is what it comes down to.

Side note: in the case where you can allow the canard to stall before the wing without significant design compromises, this lends itself to a much less violent stall behavior. IIRC a good example of this is the Rutan Long EZ

The shape of the F117 is a result of the limitations of computer technology at the time

http://luckyrobot.com/limitations-shaped-stealth-fighter/

The market is getting busy See also

Canada's Bombardier CSeries CS100 - 120 passengers.

Japans Mitsubishi Regional Jet - 80 passengers.

Brazil's Embraer E-Jet - 120 passengers.

I'm not the world's closest observer, but those aren't perfect comparisons.

The C-series nearly bankrupted Bombardier, and a lot of it's competitive advantages aren't things the market once. It's also much smaller, and frankly I've never been in a good Bombardier. There's a lot of CRJs, but they're more expensive and lower quality than ERJs. I don't think the C-series is any better. I've also dealt with Bombardier's aerospace division, and they're kind of unpleasant. Not serious competition at all.

Mitsubishi - 80 pax is half of this, more in line with the E-jet. It's a regional, not a direct competitor. This is not going to run with the big boys of the DFW-LGA/ATL-ORD type flights.

E-Jet - Great planes, again not the same league. The C919 carries "158-174" pax - that's a totally class of plane. The E-jet line tops out at 120, as this line is regional jets, most are smaller. Bombardier is totally fucked here, CRJ's are terrible. I think the E-Jet is going to do great. The 919 competes with the 737/320 class, which until now has been a duopoly with some TERRIBLE Russian attempts to compete.

News to me that technology has a nationality.

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