China’s first indigenous commercial airliner is now in revenue service with domestic budget carrier Chengdu Airlines. The ARJ21 was delivered Sunday. The aircraft is a 90-passenger version of the MD-80, which McDonnell Douglas intended to build in China in the 1990s. The ARJ21 is built by the Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (COMAC)using tooling left over from that abandoned project. It uses GE CF34 engines (the same as those used on Bombardier Challenger business jets and Embraer E-Jet airliners) and Rockwell Collins avionics. Even though the main systems were copied or bought from the West, a shortage of skilled labor and engineering help caused the development program to stretch 13 years.
Nevertheless, China’s pretty happy with what it considers a major breakthrough on its way to developing a truly Chinese airliner. That airplane, the C919, looks suspiciously like an A320 and uses CFM LEAP engines but China has said it will develop its own engines for the aircraft. Although both airframes are intended to reduce China’s dependence on Airbus and Boeing for its domestic airliner fleet, the current order books don’t represent much threat to that market dominance. There are now 343 orders for the ARJ21 and 517 for the C919. To put that in perspective, Boeing will build 624 737s this year and has a backlog of about 6,200.
