China Can Make Stealth Jets, But Not The Engine Inside Them

While over the last 18 months the internet has been abuzz with amazing pictures of very stealthy fighters, it would appear China can't make the engines to go inside them. Recent reports are detailing how China must use Russian and Ukraine engines in most of its military aircraft. Even planes it sells to other nations, 80% of these planes have foreign engines.

China is now developing a massive effort to fix this "Achilles Heel" in its military development. China’s jet engine makers, are expected to invest $16 billion in jet engine development in the near term, and perhaps up to $24 billion by 2015.

The Pratt and Whitney F135 powering the F-35 , which is the world’s most advanced and powerful tactical aircraft engine, is cost around US$8.4 billion to develop

The colossal costs in developing jet engines, and any other tech for that matter, is why the Chinese seem to invest so much effort in computer hacking. Why spend the cash when a few geeks can cut out the invention and go straight to the blueprints.

Regards

The problem is that they are based on Russian designs. Russia has managed to design some great planes, but has never been good at engine design. They recently were buying Pratt and Whitney and GE engines to install on their commercial planes.

I talked to one of their military pilots once, and he told me that when he flew the AN-124, they would sit on the end of the runway for two minutes at full throttle, with the brakes locked. If none of their engines failed during that two minutes, they released the brakes, and took off.

reply to post by travis911


There may be a new development in their engine programs. It's kind of funny too.

China is upset at being accused of reverse engineering the J-15 from the SU-33. What makes it laughable, is in the article saying that the J-15 is more advanced, they proceed to say :

"Su-33 is equipped with old-fashioned ARINC429 discrete avionics system of one-way low-speed data bus, while J-15 adopts joint avionics system of bidirectional data bus," the report reads. "TS-100, the Su-33's fire-control computer, has a computing speed of only 170,000 times per second, while the J-15's fire-control computer has an estimated computing speed of over several million times per second."

www.flightglobal.com...

Almost like they got their hands on one.

They go on to say that the J-15 is powered by a pair of indigenous WS-10 engines, which are more powerful than the Russian built engines. This would be a big development, because of the number of times that Chinese built engines have failed during tests.