China Airborne (21 page)

In the United States, Honeywell was generally known for home thermostats, but for the past two decades its most important businesses have been large-scale high-tech monitoring and control systems. These are used in the energy business, at large medical centers, and—crucially and profitably—in modern airliners. It was in this capacity, while bidding for shares in China’s aerospace projects, that Tedjarati has come to know the C919 project from the inside and to be aware of its limits as well as its potential. Simultaneously through these ambitious days of China’s aircraft-building plans, Shane Tedjarati had joined Joe T, Paul Fiduccia, Francis Chao, and the other outside tribunes, agents, and agitators for aviation reform within China.

Like those other Westerners, he believes in the explanatory power of showing Chinese officials how a liberalized air-traffic system really worked. He took one CAAC official with him on a trip to the hangar in Leesburg, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., where Tedjarati stored a small, sleek Cessna 400 airplane. “I pulled the plane out of the hangar and asked him, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ” Tedjarati said. “I told him: You are Chinese, I am Canadian, we’re both foreign nationals. It’s less than twenty-five miles to the White House, and this is the most restricted commercial airspace in America. This is as tough as it gets! So just put your finger on the map and tell me where you want to go!”

His claim was partly bluff, because if the Chinese official had said, “Okay, let’s fly right over the Lincoln Memorial and down the Mall,” Tedjarati would have had to inform him that in the years since 9/11 the Special Flight Rules over Washington had made that impossible. But they could head almost anywhere out of town, toward the west, as they did—down through the Virginia tidewater to Jamestown and Williamsburg, where they
landed at a little airport about three miles from the historic district. The airport had no control tower, which meant they could fly right in without talking to any air-traffic controllers or asking anyone’s permission. Pilots at these little airports (which make up the great majority of the landing sites in America) just “self-announce” on the local frequency, to let any other nearby aircraft know what they have in mind. “He was sure that the Air Force jets were going to be scrambled to come after us,” Tedjarati told me. “Then I took him for a similar tour in New York, circling around the Statue of Liberty and going right over Central Park. I told him, ‘We are doing this as two foreigners, with no previous flight planning or permissions, within the immediate precincts of the 9/11 tragedy. Yet, it is safe and secure. This is how it can be in China!’ I explained how it was all much safer than their system, and people got their clearances in a few minutes rather than days in advance.”

While doing missionary work for the larger growth of aviation, Tedjarati’s real work was increasing Honeywell’s share of the big Chinese aerospace projects. These efforts were almost ridiculously successful with the C919. All the crucial components of the new airplane—engines, electronics, landing gear, and so on—were sent out for international bid. Honeywell won the contracts to provide four systems, from the wheels and braking system to the flight controls and inertial-navigation electronics, for a total value of $16 billion. No other company wound up with more than one such contract, and few outsiders understood the C919 as thoroughly as Tedjarati did.

“In some ways, the Chinese can go to the moon long before they build an airliner that global carriers will buy in large numbers,” Tedjarati told me early in 2011, even as COMAC was showing mock-ups of the C919 at air shows and the Chinese press was reporting weekly on its progress. Beyond Richard Aboulafia’s skepticism in principle about state guidance for high-tech projects, Shane Tedjarati was concerned about the practical realities of managing projects as complex and on as large a scale as aircraft production. Could the Chinese system master huge, moonshot-style challenges? Of course! But “building a certified commercial aircraft is
much
more difficult than going to the moon,” he said. “A moon shot is a single mission. You’re sending four or five people. If the people die they become national heroes. This is so much more complicated, because you’re making something for the public that they’re going to be using around the world, and nothing can go wrong.”

Even aviation buffs, he said, can barely imagine the scale or complexity of large-airframe construction, or the potential for small imperfections or missed connections to create major delays and problems. For instance, the dull-sounding challenge of “cockpit integration.” This would be like designing high-end computer software—for a computer that must simultaneously monitor and control high-temperature power plants; operate and test electrical systems with thousands of connectors and many miles of cable; give pilots the data they need to control a vehicle that can weigh nearly a million pounds and travel at
nearly the speed of sound; and do countless other functions, all with triple redundancy or more, and with the constant potential of having to switch to emergency-rescue mode. “Building and certifying a commercial aircraft is one of the most complex tasks in the world,” Tedjarati said. “It takes a continental economy with a determined national will to attempt such a monumental undertaking. In almost all cases, it would require participation by internationally recognized suppliers for various components and systems. Managing and integrating all these systems into one workable, certifiable aircraft with traceable documentation is especially challenging. Many manufacturers with decades of experience get it wrong and often there are many program delays.”

He pointed out that in the entire world there are relatively few engineers experienced in the complex work of integrating software for avionics and flight controls, and most of them already work for a handful of companies, like his own. Expanding their number is not a quick or easy matter. “And what about program managers?” he asked. “They are particularly difficult to come by. The trick in these huge projects, the tiny difference between success and catastrophic failure, lay in the subtlety and perfection of program management and systems integration.

Tedjarati was careful always to make clear his confidence in China’s long-term prospects with the C919. “I believe it will succeed,” he said, “but to build a reputable, globally recognized commercial aircraft industry with a solid brand will take many years, perhaps more than one generation.” The difficulties might seem enormous, but he had learned never to underrate the Chinese capacity to cope and succeed: “I am a big believer that this will eventually come to pass and that’s what excites me about being here in China.”

How will we know whether this situation is changing, and Chinese competitors are succeeding in this complex industry? The most significant indicator would be progress against what is now by far the greatest obstacle to Chinese preeminence in the world aircraft industry: the inability of Chinese companies to produce jet engines that are anywhere close in power, efficiency, or reliability to the top-line offerings from GE, Rolls-Royce, and Pratt & Whitney.

It is obviously in hopes of closing that gap that Chinese aerospace firms have been pushing for partnerships or local-content requirements with the foreign engine-makers. Unless Chinese companies develop their own engine-making technology, or can copy or absorb techniques already devised by the market leaders, any Chinese aircraft business will be in a situation roughly like that of today’s Chinese computer-making industries. They will “make” airplanes in China, as most of the world’s computers are now Chinese-made. But the expensive components will come from overseas, for a bolting-together process on Chinese soil, and from China’s perspective the gap that separates them from a “real” aerospace industry will close slowly if at all.

Every element in an airplane’s design affects its final performance: the overall contour and smoothness, for airflow; the wings, for efficiency; the weight of every single rivet, strut, and seat cushion, which ripples through the whole design, since each extra ounce that must be carried requires stronger (and thus heavier) structures through the rest of the plane. But the big advances all depend on the engine. That is why we speak of the “jet age”: the invention of turbine jet engines allowed planes
to fly fast enough that continent-crossing travel was possible in North America or Europe, and it allowed them to fly high enough to avoid the great majority of weather problems except when taking off or descending to land. Thunderstorms, which can tower 40,000 to 50,000 feet or above, are the exception; even the largest airliners have no safe alternative than simply to fly around them.

The fundamental science of jet engines is well known; the steady improvement that has made planes quieter and ever more efficient comes from constant refinements in engineering and in manufacturing techniques. The tolerances within the engine become tighter; they are built with greater precision to withstand greater temperatures and pressures and to convert fuel into propulsion with ever less waste. These advancements don’t make planes faster, because of the physics of wind resistance. As planes near the sound barrier, each extra knot of speed meets more and more wind resistance, which requires more and more fuel to surmount.

I have around me dozens of technical reports totaling thousands of pages about why, exactly, Chinese-made engines have done so poorly. Part of the explanation is historical: Americans and Western Europeans have been steadily refining airplane engines for more than a century, and jet engines for sixty-plus years. The Chinese are only recently in the business. Partly it is because the traits that have been so valuable during China’s infrastructure-and-export boom—high volume, quick turnaround, low cost, a “happy with crappy” tolerance for product defects—are the opposite of what is required for the high-precision work of engine development. A “threat assessment” of the Chinese Air Force, prepared for the U.S. government in 2010,
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reported that “one of the biggest Achilles’ heels is the aero-engine sector, which has struggled mightily to
develop and produce state-of-the-art high performance power plants.” (Instead, the PLA Air Force still uses Russian engines in most of its planes, although it is trying hard to change that.)

The requirements for military and civilian jet engines are somewhat different, but if anything, China’s engine development for airliners lags behind what its military is trying to do. In September, 2011, Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson of
China SignPost
released an extremely detailed study of this very question—the title was “A Chinese ‘Heart’ for Large Civilian and Military Aircraft: Strategic and Commercial Implications of China’s Campaign to Develop High-Bypass Turbofan Jet Engines”—and the most surprising of its many assertions was that the Chinese aerospace establishment simply wasn’t spending enough money to keep up with developments in the West. GE is investing about $2 billion per year in research and development of new engines; Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce together invest about $3 billion more. By comparison with this annual research total from the companies that already have a large technical lead, the Chinese engine-building entity known as ACAE has budgeted only about $300 million per year through the next Five-Year Plan. Research is cheaper in China, but not by that much. As Collins and Erickson drily observe, “ACAE’s lower investment level may not enable it to catch up and develop a competitive commercial (and military) jet engine construction capability.” And, they go on, “jet engine production involves exceedingly complex supply chains and ACAE will face significant challenges in creating a sufficiently large and flexible supplier base when it becomes capable of producing its own commercial engines.”

What happens next, like so much about China, is unknowable. The engine-makers are under constant pressure to shift their production to China, to form joint ventures with local partners, to show that they deserve a place in the Chinese market by making themselves ever more fully Chinese. In 2011, GE announced a deal to share avionics technology with an AVIC subsidiary, on top of a similar engine-making deal. The potential long-term risk to the company and its U.S. production base was evident.
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“Joint ventures with jet engine market leaders like General Electric (GE) have the potential to give the Chinese aerospace industry a 100 piece puzzle with 90 of the pieces already assembled,” Collins and Erickson said of that deal.
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In a familiar pattern, destructively different time scales are also in play here. The U.S. corporation can look ahead a quarter or two; its executives operate under pay schemes that encourage them to maximize profits while they can. Their state-guided Chinese business partners have the handicaps but also the advantages of being under less short-term profit pressure. Where might this lead? Collins and Erickson spell it out: “The imperative to prioritize quarterly profits today over long-term profits and strategic concerns may be exacerbated as long-term military spending constraints in Europe, Japan, and now even the U.S. may drive Western aero-engine manufacturers even further into Chinese joint ventures to replace revenue.”