...январская череда награждений ученых и инженеров в области авиационного двигателестроения и материаловедения. Так, 6 января на церемонии в пекинском Институте Вооружений ВВС НОАК (Air Force Armament Institute) сам Ху Цзиньтао вручил от имени руководства Военной комиссии КНР почетную медаль и сертификат главному инженеру Института оборудования ВВС Гану Сяохуа (Gan Xiaohua). В течение 26 лет Ган руководил работами в ключевых областях технологий двигателестроения, в которых, как отмечалось в торжественном обращении, «достиг прорывных успехов». Предполагается, что награду инженер получил за руководство работами по созданию цифровой системы управления двигателем FADEC (Full Authority Digital Engine Control) как для серийных WS-10A, так и для неназванной модификации «Тайхана» с «большей тягой». 14 января в Пекине высшую научную награду КНР и денежную премию в размере пяти миллионов юаней – опять из рук самого Цзиньтао - за многолетнюю работу по разработке и внедрению новых сплавов для авиационных двигателей, получил бывший директор шеньянского НИИ Металлургии Академии Наук КНР Ши Чаньсюй (Shi Changxu). Комментируя награждение Ши, профессор У Соцзюнь (Wu Suojun) из Пекинского Университета отметил, что «после первого успешного полета J-20 настало время отметить тех, кто все это время оставался в тени".

From SCMP
Stealth jet team proves its metal
Stephen Chen
Jan 15, 2011

Metallurgist Shi Changxu won a top national science award yesterday for his contribution to the development of high-performance jet engines - three days after the first public test flight of the mainland's J-20 stealth fighter plane.

Professor Shi, former director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Metal Research in Shenyang , developed several families of top-secret, heat-resistant alloys, according to mainland scientists working on jet engines.

The secret alloys were developed decades ago, but because jet engine metals take a long time to test, Shi's alloys have only recently begun to be used in the mainland's jet engines.

In 1955, Shi left his teaching post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and boarded a ship for the East. He was one of 30 or so Chinese scientists held by the United States government to prevent them from returning to communist China. Shi left the US about the same time as Qian Xuesen , a rocket scientist from the California Institute of Technology, who later founded the Chinese space programme.

After he landed in Shanghai, Shi was immediately sent to Shenyang, a heavy industry base in the northeast province of Liaoning , to boost steel production. Beijing's relationship with Moscow then soured rapidly and the Russians stopped helping their old ally develop fighter jets. The military turned to Shi for help.

With hard work, genius and luck, Shi not only came up with the required alloys using the traditional approach he learned in the West, but also devised something entirely new.

The laboratory performance of the new alloys was so good that no one dared to use them. For safety concerns, plane designers stuck with traditional alloys for China's mass-produced jet engines, whose performance lagged significantly behind their overseas counterparts.

Shi's alloys then began a long march for industrial acceptance. Only recently, with their application in some of the mainland's most advanced fighter jets such as the J-20, have designers fully accepted them.

Professor Zhang Lanting , from the school of materials science and engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said the mainland's aviation material science sector had been waiting too long for this award.

Some people thought China did not have the materials to make high-performance jet engines, but they were wrong, Zhang said.

"The fact is, we have lots of top-quality materials, but to convince plane designers to use them we need to test it for decades - normally 30 years - for absolute safety," he said. "Within 10 years Chinese engines will begin to replace foreign ones in the civilian sector. In the military sector the replacement has already begun."

Professor Wu Suojun , a specialist in new materials at Beihang University, China's top aviation research institute, said the mainland was quickly narrowing the technological gap with the world's leading engine makers.

"With the successful test flight of the J-20 and other new planes, it is time to reward the heroes behind the scenes," Wu said.

Three years ago a physically disabled Chinese man unwittingly broke the law when he shot video of a military airbase in eastern China and uploaded the footage to his website. Huang Moumou’s subsequent arrest and conviction for leaking state secrets is a surprising wrinkle in the tale of China’s “accidental spies.” Civilians with cameras are Beijing’s preferred method of revealing military developments to the world. But only, it seems, when the civilians stick to the government’s script.

In August 2009 Huang drove his handicap-access vehicle — presumably a truck with a wheelchair ramp — from his home in an outlying county to visit his son, a worker in Fuzhou. As he passed by the city’s main military airfield, Huang pointed his cameraphone out the window and shot around a minute of video depicting “signage, airport facilities and several military airplanes,” according to the press reports. A pedestrian reportedly warned Huang that filming was illegal, but he kept right on shooting.

Returning home, Huang uploaded the video to his blog. “This is the first time I’ve seen airplanes, so I filmed it,” he wrote, adding, “I’m not a spy!” Fifteen thousand people watched the video before police, alerted by China’s web-monitoring Public Security Bureau, came knocking. On trial last month, Huang pleaded guilty, apologized and was handed a suspended 14-month sentence.

Officially, his crime was violating the Protection of State Secrets Law by videotaping six classified items. There’s little doubt that the Fuzhou air base indeed houses sensitive Chinese hardware: As one of the coastal air bases nearest Taiwan, Fuzhou is home to S-300 long-range air-defense missiles and a wing of F-7 fighters housed in armored shelters. There’s also a nearby army ground station for downloading satellite imagery. But whatever Huang saw, it must not have been that secret — or he probably would have disappeared into a Chinese prison, never to be heard from again.