
China Will Resurrect the World's Largest Plane - prostoalex
http://www.popsci.com/china-will-resurrect-worlds-largest-plane?src=SOC&dom=fb&con=Quartz
======
ovi256
It's obvious to me that China doesn't care that much about the AN-225 design
as for the design of the D-18 turbofan. They still can't design or manufacture
a heavy turbofan domestically. This has seriously hampered their heavy airlift
project (the Y-20, who first flew using Soviet-designed low-bypass 12-ton
thrust D-30 fans, which killed its range). The domestic WS-20 turbofan design
that was supposed to power the production Y-20 airlifter is still under wraps,
which usually means the prototype is not doing well.

Getting access to a 20-ton thrust high-bypass turbofan design is a huge step
for them.

~~~
wallace_f
Why is it difficult enough that not even a nation state as large and powerful
as china has obstacles to develop a heavy turbofan? With respect to other tech
they've developed I don't know what is technologically difficult here -- I'm
asking genuinely as a layman, it's not a rhetorical statement of disagreement.

~~~
icegreentea
Should probably begin by saying that there's no fundemental reason why China
could not eventually develop their own modern turbofans without outside
assistance. But obviously now is better for China.

Designing and building modern turbofan engines is incredibly dependent on your
mastery of materials science and fabrication. These are areas of science and
engineering that are notoriously "art like" or even "black magic like". The
accrued knowledge that sits in Rolls-Royce or GE or Pratt-Witney don't really
exist in textbooks, and they aren't taught in classes either. This knowledge
and know how was generated over 60 years of trial and error, and are jealously
guarded, not just by the manufacturers, but also by their governments.

Things to consider: modern turbine blades are already pushing the absolute
edge of lightweight-temperature resistant materials. And then modern designs
will run these blades at temperatures that are nominally above the material
failure point, because we've come up with ways to cool the structures. Oh, and
the temperature resistant alloys in use? Secret. Empirically determined, and
likely unique.

~~~
flukus
How much of that trial and error can be skipped with modern computer
simulations?

~~~
icegreentea
In the field of materials and fabrication? Not that much. Fundamentally, the
problem is that for many of the problems that we consider interesting in
materials or fabrication, meaningful analogs to say.. the Navier Stokes
equations don't even exist.

In the field of fluid and thermodynamics? Probably quite a bit. This is why I
tried to emphasize the materials and fabrication bit.

------
Someone
_" it carries a world record payload of 250 tons (to put this into comparison,
it can carry around 300,000 lbs more than the US military's Boeing made C-17"_

What was the writer thinking? My readers won't understand what 250 tons is, so
I'll use imperial metrics, too? Net effect is that this only makes full sense
to those who understand both metric and imperial units.

(I think a pound is 454 grams ('easy' to remember because that's the unit most
jam is sold in in the EU
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Kingdom#Units_of_measurement\))).
That would make 300,000 pounds about 135,000 kg or 135 tons, so it carries
about double what a C17 can carry)

~~~
chatmasta
I think it's more like "my readers don't grasp just how heavy 250 tons is."

It's equivalent to saying "Mt Everest is nearly 6 miles, or 29,000 feet,
high."

~~~
Dylan16807
If it actually gave both versions of the same number, that would be fine. But
this way is just confusing. It would be like saying "Mt Everest is nearly 6
miles high, or in other words more than 16000 feet higher than Mt Fuji"

------
diarmuidie
The AN-225's little brother the AN-124 was once used to fly a diesel
locomotive from Canada to Ireland. It worked out cheaper for the train
manufacture to pay to have it flown over, and meet the contractural delivery
date, rather than shipping it by sea and paying the fine for missing the
deadline.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/48073612@N04/5124447894](https://www.flickr.com/photos/48073612@N04/5124447894)

~~~
garrettheaver
That's pretty interesting! I see that train (or one very much like it) around
Connolly station in Dublin when I'm commuting in and out of work.

------
Animats
The PLA is trying to establish a power projection capability.

There are very few militaries in the world that can routinely operate on a
large scale a long way from their home bases. The US can and does. Russia can
do it with difficulty. Britain can do it on a small scale. Beyond that, few
armies have the logistics capability. China is gearing up to join the club.

There's also the PLA Navy's aircraft carrier program, which is progressing
slowly. They have one refurbished USSR aircraft carrier in commission for
training purposes, and two ramp-type carriers under construction.

This doesn't seem to be the PLA's big effort, though. Most of their new weapon
systems are for sea dominance in China's coastal waters, broadly defined.

------
kragen
From the title, I thought this was going to be about the Spruce Goose, but it
turns out the Spruce Goose was designed only for a 75-ton capacity, not the
250 tons of the Ан-225. The Spruce Goose had a larger wingspan (97.5 m rather
than 88 m) but the Ан-225 is longer (84 m rather than 66⅔ m).

It's interesting to reflect that the previous "world's largest plane," and
still the one with the widest wingspan, dates from WWII. In a sense this
reflects changing social priorities, and in another sense it may reflect a
generalized form of Conway's law: giant aircraft are produced by giant
monolithic bureaucracies brooking no dissent, like countries in wartime or
totalitarian governments.

If that's the case, maybe we'll see more such planes if the wars in Syria and
other places continue to spread, pushing countries like the US and the EU
powers onto more of a wartime footing. But it's not clear they'll be
strategically beneficial for fighting in the Drone Age; they're too hard to
build and too easy to destroy.

~~~
maxerickson
They aren't super sized, but between the C-17 and C-5, the US has ~250 large
cargo planes in service.

There's also hundreds of 747s that could be pressed into service (or just
utilized) in a world gone to hell scenario.

~~~
kragen
I don't think of it as a "world gone to hell scenario" so much as a "World War
II scenario" or a "Bronze Age collapse scenario". Smaller cargo planes should
be somewhat more survivable than bigger ones in an environment full of Angels'
Teeth and other micro-drones, but downing 250 large cargo planes still only
requires landing 250 small robots on them and cutting a fuel line or
something.

~~~
maxerickson
Oh, another WWII scale event meets my definition of world gone to hell.

I suppose I could have more clearly stated that I was arguing that the US is
already leaning on large aircraft strategically, it wouldn't be a shift.

~~~
kragen
Oh, I agree! But I think we've seen a trend away from things like the 747-400
and the Ан-225 already over the last decades, and not just in the military,
and I wonder why that is.

It seems likely that the current war, if it really takes off, is going to be
more significant than WWII. In WWII, major parts of Earth were not
battlefields: the Americas, Antarctica, Australia, most of Africa, India,
Mongolia, Siberia, parts of China, and orbit were spared. And there were no
nuclear weapons on the table until the end of the war, and no precision-guided
munitions at all anywhere.

It seems like this war, if not stopped quickly, could lead to the end of
territorial monopolies on force, and thus geopolitics as we know it. What will
it look like? Both the war and its aftermath are literally unimaginable. We
can't even say it'll be better or worse than WWII — precision-guided munitions
mean there's no more need to expensively Dresden a city to destroy its
industrial infrastructure, but it also means you could be killed without
warning at any moment because an IA misinterpreted your Facebook status or
your cellphone metadata, like Malik Jalal.

~~~
jfb
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV
will be fought with sticks and stones." \-- Albert Einstein

~~~
kragen
From Wikiquote:

Interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), Einstein
Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice
(2005), p. 173

Differing versions of such a statement are attributed to conversations as
early as 1948 (e.g. The Rotarian, 72 (6), June 1948, p. 9: "I don't know. But
I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. They'll use rocks!"). Another
variant ("I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but
World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones") is attributed to an
unidentified letter to Harry S. Truman in "The culture of Einstein" by Alex
Johnson, MSNBC, (18 April 2005). However, prior to 1948 very similar quotes
were attributed in various articles to an unnamed army lieutenant, as
discussed at Quote Investigator : "The Futuristic Weapons of WW3 Are Unknown,
But WW4 Will Be Fought With Stones and Spears". The earliest found was from
“Quote and Unquote: Raising ‘Alarmist’ Cry Brings a Winchell Reply” by Walter
Winchell, in the Wisconsin State Journal (23 September 1946), p. 6, Col. 3. In
this article Winchell wrote:

Joe Laitin reports that reporters at Bikini were questioning an army
lieutenant about what weapons would be used in the next war.

“I dunno,” he said, “but in the war after the next war, sure as Hell, they’ll
be using spears!”

It seems plausible, therefore, that Einstein may have been quoting or
paraphrasing an expression which he had heard or read elsewhere.

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein)

See also [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/16/future-
weapons/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/16/future-weapons/)

------
tgb
So this was originally made to carry the USSR's Buran space-shuttle-like
project. I'd never heard of Buran before, but I have heard many critiques of
the US's space shuttle program. Yet Buran looks almost identical from a
cursory view.

Why would the Soviet's independently develop a highly flawed project? This
article does a decent job answering that:
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a9763/did-
the-...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a9763/did-the-soviets-
actually-build-a-better-space-shuttle-16176311/)

~~~
izacus
> Why would the Soviet's independently develop a highly flawed project?

Probably a few reasons:

* At the point of starting Shuttle operations, the flaws of the design weren't as apparent, especially not to general public.

* Even though it LOOKS similar, it's actually not all that similar in design. The main difference is that it doesn't actually carry engines (which are the most expensive and problematic part of Shuttle due to their planned reuse) - Buran was taken into orbit by an expendable Energia rocket, which "solved" the problems with expensive engine rebuilds and testing.

* At the end of the day, Buran never got past the prototype stage. It flew a single mission (empty, fully automated), landed and was then shelved. Only two prototypes were ever built.

~~~
Retric
It's not just rebuilding engines it's returning their weight that's a problem.
The high temperatures are a result of pressure not friction. A smaller and or
less dense craft has a vastly easier time during reentry.

A shuttle actually works fairly well at around 1/5 the size. Lower thermal
stress means no tiles. It would have a single ideally swappable engine large
on board fuel and no external fuel tank. Still needs SRB's but those actually
work fairly well.

~~~
digi_owl
My understanding is that it got fatally compromised as either a 3 letter
agency or the pentagon wanted to use it for satellite maintenance/retrieval.
Never happened, but it still resulted in a hybrid design that was basically
suitable for neither. In the end it may well have continued flying as a kind
of "national pride" issue.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
> a 3 letter agency or the pentagon wanted to use it for satellite
> maintenance/retrieval. Never happened

I think they did do satellite maintenance from the shuttle a few times, most
notably on the Hubble telescope.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Speaking from memory, but AFAIR the biggest impact of those military
requirements on the Shuttle design were coming from the "nonstandard" orbits
and orbital schedules those missions would require.

~~~
icegreentea
The Air Force requested the ability for the shuttle to take off from
Vandenburg Airforce Base, go into polar orbit, and then land back at
Vandenburg at the end of that one orbit. This required that the Shuttle have
~1000nm of cross range (that is that once it deorbits, it needed to deviate
from its ballistic path by 1000nm). This required big ass wings (which the
shuttle got).

The Airforce also helped drive the payload (weight and dimension)
requirements, but I feel that this is secondary to the cross-range
requirement.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
Is an aircraft of this size economical, or is it a fuel hog useful only for
carrying huge single-piece cargos that smaller aircraft cannot? Is it useful,
or is it sheer size-vanity?

~~~
finid
The author of that article answered all your questions. Take a few moments to
read it.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Hm, the words "fuel" and "economic" do not occur in that article.

You can infer something from phrases like "flying super heavy cargos" and "by
bringing infrastructure ... that are normally too big for airlift" but it
would be interesting to see if anyone has something to add directly on that
topic as to what exactly the drawbacks to that scale are. The fact that only
one was ever made also implies that the uses are limited.

~~~
finid
"Fuel" and "economic" do not have to be used explicitly in the article, or is
reading and comprehension a lost art?

Take the following paragraph, for example:

> For China, the An-225 would open whole new frontiers in commercial and
> military air transportation. A fleet of civilian An-225s could quickly ship
> heavy and bulky cargoes of massive scale, ranging from construction
> equipment to consumer goods. For humanitarian purposes, the An-225 could
> support disaster relief operations, able to fly in not just large amounts of
> aid, but also by bringing infrastructure like power generation and water
> treatment that are normally too big for airlift.

That spells out in plain language why possession of the An-225 and its
technologies make economic sense for China. And the paragraph after that state
the military reasons why China would need the An-225.

------
to3m
"84 meters ... 88 meters ... 250 tons ... 300,000 lbs"

~~~
maxerickson
The US also operates a fleet of larger cargo planes than the one chosen for
the comparison.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy)

(I think the typical reader will have little intuition for the cargo capacity
of the C-17, so the more instructive comparison looks at the most capable
operational US plane.)

~~~
stangles1
The comparison to the C-17 rather than the C-5 seems rather deliberate to me
(along with using lbs instead of tons for the unit). It's more sensational if
a future Chinese military cargo plane "beats" a US cargo plane in cargo
capacity by XXX,000 of anything.

~~~
to3m
Any time they don't translate between units, or mix different types together,
I assume the writer is not only functionally innumerate, but also just
repeating what somebody else has told them to say...

Also note that (according to Wikipedia) the capacity is 250,000kg - so 275
tons, or 551,155 lbs.

The C-17's cargo capacity (again, from Wikipedia) is 77,500kg - so 85 tons, or
170,858lbs. That looks a lot more like a difference of 380,000lbs than
300,000lbs to me, which, with some journalistic licence, could surely become
"almost 400,000lbs more". You may well be correct about the sensationalism
aspect, and here they are leaving some of that on the table.

So I don't really know what's going on. Like I said, functionally
innumerate... (Though of course, calculation error at this end is always a
possibility! But nobody's paying me to do this, so I'm going to go with my gut
here.)

------
sschueller
Nice to see this incredible cold war era plane not go the way of the concord.
But in its case there is still a possibility of a profitable market for
transporting very large and heavy machinery via aircraft.

------
sologoub
The main problem for most post-Soviet production has long been that the supply
chain now includes 2+ countries. Antonov is a prime example - had AN-124 and
AN-225 been "Ukrainian" planes, we would have seen more production and
commercializations.

The problem is that these are Soviet planes and with the current Russian-
Ukrainian relations in shambles, the production has stopped. Much of avionics
and those turbofans are (were?) made in Russia:
[http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/ukraines-antonov-will-
weste...](http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/ukraines-antonov-will-westernize-
this-huge-soviet-era-c-1746015355)

In my view, this is just thrashing in a frantic bid to keep the company alive.
Sad, given its storied past.

------
djrogers
There is very little chance that story is even remotely true. The story had 2
sources - Saddam Hussein, and Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf aka 'Baghdad Bob' (if
you don't remember him, look him up - he was a meme before the Internet made
memes a thing). On top of that, the story changed from a farmer to a few
peasants and back again depending on who was talking and when.

It was propaganda to make the US military look weak and ineffective - the same
kind of propaganda that let us watch a split screen of al-Sahhaf's press
conference saying the US hadn't taken Baghdad airport and US forces strolling
around its tarmac.

~~~
macintux
Curious to what in the world this is in reply.

~~~
commentreply
The above comment was probably in reply to the following:

"...a plane that big is probably a huge target, people would attempt to shoot
at it even with small arms, and it is not impossible to get lucky with them
(happened at least once in Iraq War for example, when a random farmer downed a
US helicopter right on the start of the war with his hunting rifle... the
chance of it working was tiny, the rifle didn't even had the range to ever
reach the helicopter, but somehow, it did..."

------
doctorstupid
___China buying and building An-225s would exponentially increase its power
projection capabilities..._ __

I expect a scientific publication to not popularize the misuse of
'exponential'.

------
kostyash
To make it possible Ukraine and Chine will need to redevelop many technologies
that were used to build Mriya. The technologies were gone when USSR collapsed.

~~~
qaq
Not that many the bulk of manufacturing was done in Ukraine what was sourced
externally can be sourced from subcontractors. For example engines are
manufactured by Motor Sich (Ukraine based) which is still a fairly large
engine manufacturer etc.

~~~
avmich
Hydrogen engines for Energiya, RD-0120, were made in Voronezh by KBKhA, which
is still producing rocket engines. However this particular engine is
practically lost - can't be recreated without extensive R&D program.

It's not enough to have the original manufacturer survive... Can Rocketdyne
manufacture another F-1 today? So it's quite possible - though not certain -
that Motor Sich wouldn't be able to create a unique enough engine, even if it
did that in the past.

~~~
qaq
The engine is not unique to Mria it was used on AN-124 and Motor Sich has a
modernised version going through testing Д-18ТМ so should not be any issues on
that front

------
the_mitsuhiko
Pretty sure it was resurrected before the Chinese came in. A second plane was
started a few years back already.

------
perrylaj
Tyler Rogoway (formerly of Jalopnik's FoxtrotAlpha and now writing for
TheDrive.com) had a take on China's goals(1). He seems to think that the
plane's ability to act as a launch craft is a notable. I've found Rogoway to
be a pretty good source of digestable and non-sensational military tech info.

1\. [http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5083/why-china-wants-
to...](http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5083/why-china-wants-to-put-the-
gargantuan-antonov-an-225-mriya-back-into-production)

~~~
coredog64
Air launch is an incredibly tricky operation. Even something as trivial as a
500 lb. bomb undergoes lots of trials before it is accepted for use.

The US Space Shuttle program only ever did glide testing of the orbiter off
the back of the 747 carrier. A real launch of an orbital vehicle off the back
of an AN-225 would mean serious envelope pushing and would be putting an
extremely expensive aircraft at risk every time.

------
smegel
Link's broken for anyone else? I get:

> Oops! Something went wrong. Please scroll down to find your content.

------
base
For the people that want to know more about the AN-225 there is a very
interesting documentary on youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAyD16lWznc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAyD16lWznc)

------
Apocryphon
Aw, I thought it meant that they're modernizing the Spruce Goose.

------
cm2187
Is this really meant for civilian usage or does anyone think China is trying
to match the US military forces projection capabilities?

~~~
prasadjoglekar
Perhaps a bit of both? The article cites both humanitarian and military power
projection capabilities.

~~~
finid
Thanks for taking the time to read the article.

------
dnh44
Is it just me that can't see the contents of the comments in the past couple
days?

------
SandB0x
Writers! Please don't use "exponentially", which has a precise meaning, in
place of a more modest word such as "greatly".

> "China buying and building An-225s would exponentially increase its power
> capabilities not just in Asia, but across the world."

~~~
mehwoot
Maybe the exponent is really small, like 1.01

------
daurnimator
Can't see the article. It redirects me to
[http://www.popsci.com.au/?src=redirect](http://www.popsci.com.au/?src=redirect)
with an error: "Oops! Something went wrong. Please scroll down to find your
content."

~~~
finid
In cases like this, use Tor Browser.

~~~
stepik777
Or Google Translate

