China’s first domestically made passenger plane completes maiden flight
apnews.com
apnews.com
I guess the good news is that if they copied enough, well enough, maybe it won’t fall out of the sky on a regular basis.
To wit:
(From the Wikipedia article on the C919)
Chinese cyberthreat actor Turbine Panda, linked to the Ministry of State Security’s Jiangsu Bureau, penetrated a number of the C919's foreign components manufacturers including Ametek, Capstone Turbine, GE Aviation, Honeywell, Safran, and others and stole intellectual property and industrial process data with the aim of transitioning component manufacturing to Chinese companies.[26][27][28][29] The report stated that the operations involved both cyber intrusion and theft as well as HUMINT operations, in most cases using a piece of code custom written for this industrial espionage operation.[26][27][28][29]
On October 15, 2018, ten Chinese nationals, including intelligence officials, were indicted by the US for allegedly working with COMAC to allegedly steal the secrets of thirteen foreign aerospace companies working on the C919.[51]
As of 2019, four people have been arrested in the US as a result of investigations into this economic espionage and theft of trade secrets.[29] In November 2022, a federal jury in Cincinnati convicted Yanjun Xu, 42, on counts of conspiracy to commit economic espionage, conspiracy to commit trade secret theft, attempted economic espionage and attempted trade secret theft. The US court found that Xu played a key role in a plot to steal trade secrets from western aerospace firms, for the purpose of helping the C919 commercial airliner program. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.[30]
I suspect the hard part of putting together a plane like this is getting the entire assembly line/industrial ecosystem bootstrapped, and there's not a whole lot that spycraft can do to actually build out that industry.
https://eurasiantimes.com/chinas-engine-problems-despite-new...
Avionics are easier but…software really isn’t that easy, especially software that prevents your plane from crashing.
Do you have any evidence that the C919 is "largely the result" of theft? What specific components do you think are stolen? How do you know the extent to which espionage influenced/benefited the design? Right now, you're just citing accusations of specific acts of espionage (from Wikipedia, so we have no idea how meaningful this list is, or whether it's just a motivated editor making a mountain out of a molehill), and then drawing a very broad conclusion about the C919.
Note that the highest-tech parts of the C919 are being bought directly from European and American suppliers. For example, the engines are delivered by CFM International, which is a Franco-American joint venture.
I hate to say it but we can't have it both ways...
They should be sanctioned for their treatment of the Uyghurs alone, not to mention Tibet, reneging on their promises around Hong Kong, and the fact that their sloppy laboratory practices most likely unleashed a global pandemic. Their cruel zero COVID policy resulted in the death and suffering of millions. The CCP are not the good guys.
I really just can’t wrap my head around HN’s sympathy for such an evil regime.
So? Who cares? FAA doesn't decide what flies in China, and obviously this plane is made for the Chinese market and related markets, not to sell the plane specifically to the US. Such a unrelated statement...
I for one is happy to see competition to Airbus and Boing, we need more planemakers from more countries as it's getting very stale out there.
Lots of people do.
Ducted fans are not as noisy as helicopters.
Perhaps that was a hasty condemnation. It amounted to a wet-blanket response, and doesn't seem very considered.
When autopilot malfunction, who is going to take over the control?
>Ducted fans are not as noisy as helicopters.
So why are we not using this miraculous technology on helicopters to make them noiseless? There is some catch, isn't there?
And my point with minor fender benders still stands. Immediately not flight worthy.
It's easy to condemn something because, I guess it feels good to be the rebel online. I don't know.
Folks show flying car go-pro videos online, more every day. Never from an airport (where does that air-traffic control idea come from?). They always seem ecstatic to be in the air, free as a bird. That alone will make flying cars inevitable - people want them badly.
Of course some rules will have to follow - simple low-altitude one-directional flying lanes seem prudent. But time will tell. Of course it will; these things are already possible and get easier to make every day.
Those solutions and technolgoies exists only in your imagination, otherwise there would be comercial product readily available for me to buy. Show me where I can buy a flying car, which is completely autonomous, noiseless and I don't need a pilot license to fly it. It does not exist. And as long as it has propelers chopping into the air, it is not going to exists because it is going to be regulated over cities into oblivion due to noise.
I'm done holding your hand. Go read up on the subject and get an iota of actual information. Or watch in amazement as the world changes while you deny change is possible.
Flying cars waste a lot of energy in that whole "defying gravity" thing. It's sort of just the continuation of the dream of "I can travel when and where I want, because there's no meaningful cost of fuel or emissions to care for."
Our best hope is more integrated transport models; maybe electric vehicles with a few dozen kilometres range, because their primary purpose is last-mile travel once people leave far-more-efficient rail networks.
Let me guess, you're from the US? This is not true at all, Europe has it's own FAA, called EASA.
It's delusional to point and scream about IP-- the knowledge exists and will eventually flow broadly. Singing and dancing around with legal frameworks to try to pretend it belongs to one specific company or country who got their first is just wasting effort trying to unring a bell.
The secret to staying the market leader isn't hoarding patents and copyrights, it's about iterating faster and the quality of execution. But that's hard and requires constant effort, so businesses would rather whine and demand sanctions to try to keep competitors out of their market.
Maybe if the Western world gets bootlegged hard enough, it will force a long-needed reality check about this. We've been able to keep up the global IP charade because the "important" economies agreed to play and imposed various reciprocity treaties on the rest. When you're seeing countries with a historic looser attitude about it achieving economic sovereignity, the sparks are going to fly.
Honestly, I don't care if China took some inspiration and built a plane, stealing IP is a first class business in 2023 in the west too.
If we want China to stop playing shit games, we shouldn't play shit games either. We should lead by example and build trust within our own populace, then talk about what China can and can't do.
So yeah, used to care, couldn't give a shit anymore. I'm personally tired of being whacked over the head by the Chinese and Russian boogeymen it's getting tiring. Until I see some proper improvements here from a policy perspective I'll say it again...
Good luck to them for having their own airliners.