China’s Civil Challenge The Comac C919 is airborne
China’s first indigenous designed and built passenger jetliner the C919 made its first public flight test on 5 May 2017. The aircraft with a greenand-blue striped tail, underwent a lengthy preflight check before the test flight that lasted about an hour.
Still, the C919 is years, if not decades, behind those aircraft made by Airbus and Boeing that are cheaper to fly and easier to maintain. Safety regulators in Europe, the United States and elsewhere still have to certify the aircraft before it can be sold outside China, which includes the engines, its cockpit and many systems. The C919 has gear manufactured by western companies including General Electric and Honeywell.
“We used to believe that it was better to buy than to build, better to lease than to buy,” President Xi Jinping of China told workers during a recent visit to the plant. “We need to spend more on research and manufacturing our own airliners.” China’s investment in civilian aircraft manufacturing is enormous! The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, universally known as Comac, unveiled the extent of its activities for the first time on 4 May, showing off a complex of more than 110 buildings.
The second C919, coated in green anti-corrosion paint but not yet displaying any airline’s colours, will not be ready until September, said Bao Pengli, Comac’s deputy director of project management for manufacturing and final assembly. Only after building six prototypes will Comac decide whether it is ready for large-scale production, he said.
Comac already has 570 orders from 23 buyers, but these have almost entirely come from Chinese companies with a couple of small overseas air carriers, having links to China. A notable exception is an order for 20 airliners from General Electric Capital Aviation Services, which is also a big supplier to the C919 programme.
The C919 is designed to compete with the Airbus 320 and the Boeing 737, single- aisle aircraft that are workhorses of the world’s airlines. For Comac, the aircraft represents culmination of decades of design & development effort. For Airbus and Boeing, this is a clear challenge to a profitable duopoly that has endured for decades. But it is still unclear that China can produce aircraft that are as efficient and reliable as even the current generation of Boeings and Airbuses.
China has imbibed much in recent years on how to build single-aisle aircraft, by making many parts for Boeing 737s and by assembling entire A320s for Airbus. Decades later, these experiences and a fastdeveloping aviation sector — China the world’s second-busiest behind the United States — mean there are few doubts about the C919’s integrity.
For China, the C919 is just the beginning. Even if the aircraft proves less fuel-efficient than western counterparts, the state-controlled airline industry may still buy it, and the Chinese aviation market in the coming years is expected to rival only the American in size–and perhaps even surpass it.
And although the aircraft represents a new challenger for aircraft sales, Airbus and Boeing, increasingly dependent on Chinese airlines for sales as well as on Chinese suppliers for parts, have welcomed its debut. “The C919 will bring new competition to the market,” Airbus said in a statement. Yukui Wang, a Boeing spokesman, added: “We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate Comac for successful development of the C919 aircraft.”
Comac is already looking beyond the C919, on the design and manufacture of a wide-body jet that would compete with larger airliners like the Boeing 747 and the A340. Steven Lien, the president for Asia at Honeywell’s aerospace division, said that Russia and China were in the final stages of negotiating a plan to jointly design and produce this (see seperate item).