China has the ability to manufacture automobile engines, although its performance lags behind that of other powerful countries. Then I'll tell you why China can't make aero engines. The development of China's aviation power industry is really entangled with too much bitterness and regret. At first, China's aviation industry was strongly supported by the big brother of the Soviet Union. At that time, the Soviet Union's all-round industrial support for China ushered in the first spring of China's aviation industry. With the help of Big Brother, China has quickly established an aviation industry system that can compete with the world-class level. Basically, once the new aircraft models and new power systems of the Soviet Union are imported, they can be copied and finalized in a few years. However, China has not formulated a long-term development plan from imitation to development for aviation industry and aviation power industry, but limited the tasks of aviation industry itself to imitation, production and repair.
R&D funds are less than a fraction of those given to North Korea. Because China has been in the state of aero-engine imitation production for a long time, it has a serious lack of understanding of the objective laws of aero-engine research and development, and has no clear understanding of the long-term, arduous and large-scale investment in aero-engine research and development. The investment intensity that leads to the development of aero-engines in China is far below the actual needs of development. For example, in the early 1960s, China began to develop a six-thrust turbofan engine. According to the statistics of 606 research institutes, the development expenditure in 20 years is only 654.38+0.5 billion yuan, with an average of 7.5 million yuan per year. When R&D enters a critical stage and requires high investment intensity, it is only 2 million yuan per year for two years. It is incredible to develop advanced large-scale aero-power systems with such total investment and investment intensity, but it is a historical fact.
Before the 1990s, our total investment in aviation industry was less than110 of our aid to Vietnam, less than a fraction of our aid to North Korea, and even less than our aid to Albania! In the same period, China imported Spey MK202 engine for imitation, but it cost 654.38+0.3 billion yuan.
According to foreign experience, the typical engine development cycle is about 8~ 14 years, and the service life of the whole engine is about 30 years. The development funds are increasing year by year, and the development conditions are different according to the size and model of the engine, ranging from 500 million to 2 billion dollars. If the input intensity can't be guaranteed, the engine can't be developed with good quality and quantity on schedule, and the consequence can only be that the development fails and the model is dismounted.
The fundamental reason for the long-term poor development of China's aviation power industry is more improper decision-making. Of course, at the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the development of space and missile nuclear weapons was the focus of a specific period. At that time, the international situation was that the shadow of nuclear weapons and the hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union hung over the new China for a long time. In order to realize the threat of breaking through nuclear hegemony, China must invest heavily in the strategic rocket and missile industries.