An aviation analyst takes a historical look at what happened to the Soviet aviation industry after the wall came down, and surmises that China is following the same path:
What’s striking about the post-Soviet civil aviation experience is the extent of the disaster. It wasn’t that there were a few uncompetitive planes or a few companies that needed restructuring. This was a complete industry write-off. No civil programs survived in more than token form. Soviet civil aviation was an evolutionary dead end…
The death of the Soviet aero universe resonates today because China seems to be heading down a Soviet path. In China, a government-owned industry is creating jets primarily for the national market. While Western suppliers are welcome to bid components, intellectual property (IP) concerns guarantee that they will bid last-generation technology. An emphasis on locally-based joint ventures makes things worse—there will be pressure on the prime to select products created by these joint ventures. Unlike the Soviets, China hasn’t erected a wall around its aero industry; just unpleasant barriers that modern technology might not cross.
Take China’s ARJ21 regional jet. Please. For the past decade, this misbegotten clunker was presented as a harbinger of China’s coming aviation challenge. Today, it’s simple. Non-aero people take this plane seriously, seeing it as yet another example of the eclipse of Western manufacturing by a rising China. Aviation professionals think it’s a disaster. It’s heavy enough to be a typical Soviet jet, with 15% more weight per seat than Bombardier or Embraer’s equivalents. It uses imported equipment that was state of the art a decade or two ago. Some unlucky Chinese carriers might be forced to take a few, putting them at a competitive disadvantage against anyone with a good aircraft.
So far, the ARJ21 story has been one of polite deference. Nobody wants to deliver the bad news. On his visit to China this month, President Obama even promised to assist AVIC with US certification for the ARJ21. He endorsed a check that nobody in their right mind would ever cash. But China’s industry would be better off getting some tough love. To put it in Berlin Wall terms, Premier Wen, tear down this plane.
There’s no question that the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner have had birthing pains of their own, but when those launch issues are fully ironed out – and they will be – we’ll have to competing visions of per mile passenger revenues, one based on maximizing the number of seats in an aircraft, and the other on maximizing the efficiency of the airframe/powerplant combination. Delivering a domestically built DC-9 in the 21st Century will sell only as many planes as the government will endorse. About the best you can say is that China’s aerospace industry will have the chance to get smart on the state of 1965 engineering.
It’s a good thing we’re smarter about such things over here.
Wiki needs an update as Boeing is moving across the street from my office. The biggie 747 comes in every afternoon – neat to watch.
This reminds of something an engineer at DARPA told me years ago – “the Chinese are not good at making stuff, they are pretty good at making stuff better, but not inventing from the ground up”.
So, see any parallels with Government Motors?
Nonetheless hopefully Boeing, LockMart and Northrop Grumman take the threat seriously and try to clean up their houses a bit. The 787 has shown that the “world is flat” fads can have a lot more dreamy eyed luster to them than steely eyed analysis. That outsourcing even your DESIGN effort all around the world not only can play into the hands of countries who want to nationalize their industries (and, while perhaps not threaten their technical edge, close significant markets) and completely wreck the coherence of the design. This has significant negative financial consequences in the long run, as the laws of engineering will eventually have the last say over powerpoints built by the business development department. (McDonnel-Douglas’ short term finance-led culture also eventually took over Boeing’s long-term, good engineering-led culture after the 1997 merger too, creating the environment for the all too avoidable massive and frankly embarrassing setbacks on that program. The same type of engineering mistakes that left McDonnel-Douglas in the position to be bought out in 1997. Business development guys are absolutely necessary, but they shouldn’t be in charge of design!)
Even with globalization there’s still some certain benefits to physically co-locating the majority of the design/systems-engineering/final assembly/rapid prototyping/test effort. E-mails, video-conferencing and phone calls still can’t come close to the ability of a designer to get up out of his cubicle, walk 2 minutes to the shop and talk face to face with the manufacturing guys with a test item in hand on a daily basis to make a truly superior quality product in record time. Just a thought from my brief personal experience in industry. Anyways, as “Benedict Arnold” CEO’s move cheap toy and tire manufacturing to low wage countries overseas it’s exactly the type of high tech, high value added industries like Aerospace that should expand in America. This would hopefully keep a solid base of blue collar manufacturing jobs for the large swath of humanity for whom college inspired white collar work just isn’t their cup of tea. I think this can happen too provided, of course, our company CEO’s don’t screw it all away (never guaranteed but just a risk you have to live with) and the government doesn’t mess things up the way the British wrecked their once great aero-industry. On the list of things America has and China has to make a good aerospace industry (resources, capital, engineering talent and open, free markets) America’s Achilles heel will be our engineering talent and the dwindling numbers of Americans getting advanced engineering degrees relative to those in other countries. You can’t keep that core of high tech blue collar manufacturing jobs without a kernel of white collar engineers and designers working hand in hand with them. Instead, our students are majoring in useless fluff because college is culturally seen as an at least four year long adult summer camp rather than an opportunity to learn a higher end job skill. My personal remedy to this is to tie all non GI-bill government financial aid for college to something that actually renders a service to the Republic, such as science, engineering and medicine, not hyphenated American studies, sociology and pyschology. If you want to study that fine, but finance yourself. The taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing such low ROI majors.
On another note, although clearly mounted on the wrong plane, it’s nice to see some ALQ-99 pods finally bringing some class to thr photos on your site!