How would it work to swap out Western components with Chinese ones? For example, how would they get the Honeywell avionics to work with the CJ-1000 engine? Wouldn't they have to redesign huge parts of it, take the whole thing through testing, etc?
COMAC C919
- Thread starter Deino
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Software can be very modular, or modularized. Control law outputs and inputs for the CJ-1000 shouldn’t be any different than for some other engine. These are all things you can control through programming.
A lot of aircraft have multiple engine options. It's quite common actually. Honeywell avionics should totally support additional engine types.
I think your question clearly captures the danger that C919 project is in. Its essentially running on borrowed time at this point. I think US will sanction COMAC very soon to stop exporting engines and other avionics to essentially stop c919 project from getting any kind of traction.
Unfortunately, it will also be very effective becauce c919 was designed during the times when US was touting Free trade and China's rise is welcome that type of message. China never even thought that US would be aggressive enough to sanction China so openly. I think they designed C919 to be as technologically advanced as possible and as attractive to the airlines but in the process ended up depending too much on foreign components. Other than the airframe, pretty much everything else has to be imported.
Once US pull the plug c919 will simply not be able to cope with so many components and software needing to be replaced. It will probably need another decade to come up with domestic solutions.
China's only leverage is that they can also stop buying boeing but I don't think that leverage exists anymore because US actually wants to cripple China as much as possible. So, China not buying boeing is not really seen as a bad thing anymore in the US.
The issue of using foreign supplied subsystems was to expedite export potential and foreign regulatory approvals rather than any actual technical hurdles on AVICs part, avionics in particular being one area where Chinese systems were already on par with western systems with compatible interfaces so that's not really an issue. Chinese domestic subsystems were always a factor in the C919's development especially for possible derivatives, so what this really does is accelerate integration and use of said domestic components.
Chinese systems maybe on par when it comes military systems but I don't think commercial aviation components are on par. There are many things in commercial systems like safety, smoothness of flight, engine efficiency and so on that are not really a focus on military planes. Commercial planes really focus alot on efficiency, And before C919 China hasn't really made a viable commercial plane that has these things, so that they could actually have experience and industrial scale to develop those systems.
Its kinda like semiconductors. China never really had to focus on developing since they could just buy from abroad so they never really put money to develop them 20 years ago. Now that they have the money, education, customer base to build commercial planes, they suddenly realize they need thousands of components which are very sophisticated and need a long time to master. The whole supply chain of making a commercial plane is huge.
The main issue is the engine. The CJ-1000 is still not ready and the WS-20 engine is lacking in critical performance parameters like engine lifetime and fuel consumption. As for the other components like the avionics, like I said in another comment, the component base of the Y-20 can likely be repurposed. I think this would take like 2-4 years to do looking at the Russian experience.
Boeing is not expecting the 737MAX sales to China to happen anytime soon and they got a large order to India just recently. So who knows the ban might happen.
Boeing is not expecting the 737MAX sales to China to happen anytime soon and they got a large order to India just recently. So who knows the ban might happen.
I must say that in the past day, I have seen you needlessly cause two threads to derail with comments like this.
I would advise you to read up on the posts before yours and understand the issues at hand, before you comment further
Well, I'm not making my comment out of a hat. Its something I have read many times in news articles. Example, this one from 2022:
Sash Tusa, aerospace and defence analyst at research firm Agency Partners says in this article,
“To take a C919 and turn it into a Chinese-only aircraft would require redesign, testing of every single certificate, most important of which is the engines. I’ll see you in the late 2030s,”
This is a statement made by an industry expert, and it is a reasonable one. Making major changes to important components like engines and flight safety system will essentially need a redesign and they will have to do re-certification tests, which takes many-many years.
Unless these industry experts have worked in a product development process before they don’t know what they’re talking about with regards to making major changes to important components. You don’t in fact need to redo the whole test stack every time you swap out an old component for a new component. The amount of time you need to retest a component swap in fact depends on 1) the maturity of the component itself, 2) the maturity of the overall system the component belongs in, 3) the level of risk involved in either the component or its swap. Testing a new engine is of course always going to be a very big deal, but outside of that most other non critical systems only need to demonstrate equivalent fulfillment of requirements. You also don’t need to swap to all domestic all at once. In fact the parts replacement process has both lower test burden and lower risk if you swap out components gradually as part of your continuous product improvement process, since it will allow you to put those components out into field to be tested in real operations without stacking risks of having everything new tested all at once. This is almost certainly what will happen with C919 indigenization, and in fact this process has already started.
Outside of a new engine and the avionics suite pretty much every foreign part in the C919 is low complexity and low risk, and only needs to demonstrate equivalent engineering performance requirements. The domestic avionics however can effectively be an indigenous copy of the foreign avionics forked so that it can be sustained domestically. The engines meanwhile will already have their own test and certification process so would only need to fulfill verification requirements at the integration testing level. While these things will take time they are also not the kind of full decade long reset of development that the sources cited in that article claims. Just because someone is a consultant in an industry doesn’t mean they actually know how product development in that industry works.
EDIT: And to the point I'm making here, after double checking the professional background of the consultant they're quoting, that dude has clearly has never seen time on a factory floor or an R&D lab.
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