Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no point in designing a new engine if it doesn’t significantly improve on the state of the art

Oh but there is. I would love to see more European alternatives to US designs even at 5% less efficiency and power. Surely it can’t be that expensive to create an engine in 2025 similar to the state of the art 2005, when you have all the hindsight plus unlimited access to the original design?

Events of this week show that this will be very important.

View on HN

Rolls Royce is British.

And PBS is Czech, to name one.

It is. Both GE and P&W newest generation of engines realized on the order of 20% efficiency gains over their previous products. They both cost in the billions / 10's of billions in r&d, which may sound doable, but realize that they were both starting off with organizations (engineers, facilities, decades of experience, etc.) built to do that. China has thrown 10's of billions and 10's of thousands of people at this problem and still hasn't cracked it after 10ish years.

There's sort of two tracks when it comes to jet engines: commercial aviation and military. Commercial just focuses on efficiency, while military has other considerations to account for. And in both sectors there's plenty of European competition, US/EU joint ventures, and subcontractors/licensed manufacturing going on.

Europe does have enough aerospace talent to make a jet engine especially at the cutting edge, but there's a significant amount of tech transfer between the US and Europe happening at the same time.

I agree, but it does not seem so bleak. According to Wikipedia[1]:

  The manufacturers market share should be led by CFM with 44% followed by Pratt & Whitney with 29% and then Rolls-Royce and General Electric with 10% each.

CFM is a 50/50 American/French joint venture, and Rolls-Royce is British.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_turbofan_manufacture...

Safran can not make a competitive commercial jet engine on their own and Rolls Royce is a generation behind both GE and P&W, and given the state of the UK not likely to catch up. Right now there is really P&W and GE and then everyone else.

SAFRAN (French national aerospace company) make the LEAP turbofans used on some A320s and 737s - https://www.safran-group.com/group/profile/aircraft-propulsi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com