Last week, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) received final certification of its C919 narrowbody airliner from the Chinese aviation authority. Comac’s 158- to 168-passenger indigenous aircraft puts China’s airline manufacturing sector in direct competition with Boeing and Airbus’s narrowbody entries, the 737 Max and A320neo, respectively. The road to certification was long and troubled, having started back in 2009. Meanwhile, political friction complicates the market, with many of the C919’s systems coming from Western suppliers.
For example, according to a report in the trade publication Military & Aerospace Electronics, the C919’s avionics were developed by a consortium of GE and China’s Aviation Industry Systems (AVIC). Auxiliary power units (APUs) and other technologies come from Honeywell. Parker Aerospace and AVIC jointly developed and provide the fly-by-wire flight control system as well as fuel inerting and hydraulic systems. And Toulouse, France-based Liebherr-Aerospace supplies the landing gear and cabin-air management system for the C919.
Financial research firm Huaxi Securities said, “The C919 will gradually begin to replace single-aisle aircraft made by Boeing and Airbus. In the next 20 years, China’s demand for narrowbody passenger aircraft like the C919 will be on average 300 per year.”
Thanks but I’ll take an early Dreamliner, a DC-10 or a square window de Havilland Comet. Safer.
So, once again, naïve Western companies “partner” with (government-owned) Chinese companies and gleefully hand over the very intellectual property that those Chinese companies need to (eventually) put them out of business. The only question I see is whether the US Defense and State Departments knowingly authorized it all or not. Brilliant.
Nailed it! Exactly what is happening for decades! Oh look! their military and space aircraft looks so similar! Wonder why grandpa is protected by the elites and keeps supporting “business” with china! corruption is spread all over…
You need to go back to 2018 and read about a Chinese company named ZTE. They nearly went out of business because of our sanctions against them because they were selling products, with USA components, to North Korea and Iran. Guess who told the Commerce Department to lift the sanctions in order to protect 75k Chinese jobs? That would be Donald J Trump, who bragged about it in a tweet. Guess who received over 40 trademarks that year from China? That would be Ivanka Trump. There’s patriotism, politics and then there’s money. Hunter Biden is a rank amateur compared to the Ivanka and her daddy.
I will not ride in or on anything made in China… I tried it and almost died. Like the drywall they send to America… it is designed to kill you.
To be fair, remember when, not so long ago, we were hearing over and over about what a wonderful thing it was to “partner with China” to take advantage of China’s “opening aviation market” and for Western businesses to get a piece of that action? The myth was that China was loosening restrictions on personal freedoms and allow easier passenger air travel, and maybe even personal aircraft use, if not downright ownership. Not surprisingly, those predictions have turned out to be massively far-fetched and any expectations of ethics in such partnerships must now face reality.
China is developing industry and supporting infrastructure at an incredible (read: alarming) rate. While many goods are of the expected poor quality, they now have the capability to produce some quality products, thanks to the “partnered” technology shares. They are building power plants with gigawatt capacity, fueled by – yes, our coal. Coal that is too dirty to burn here. China simply does not care about anything but progress at any cost. They use our technology companies like a cheap call girl – pay them until they get what they want, and dump them on the dark street corner. We have a local steel producer who had the corner on the world market for electrical steel – years ago sold out to foreign producers who “just wanted to see how it was done.” They have since sold twice. The American corporate “get rich quick” scheme is actually selling us into poverty. And, China has a virtually unlimited source of manpower – one that works more by force than free will, and thus is at a cost far below anything we can offer. If you can assemble the pieces of this economic puzzle, you can see where this is all heading.
So do they call the operators manual a “Comac book”?
When the US and EU certification authorities certify this plane then maybe the big two should be concerned, but not yet. One would have expected the that former Soviet Union/Russian Federation to have developed a competitive commercial airliner industry but never did, and one has to question if China can really do it, but then again the West gave China the tools that they never offered to the Russians. However, as commented above, the Chinese have bought or stolen the technology systems they needed to get where they are, and one can certainly bet that their military are using the same stolen/bought/reverse engineered components as are going into this commercial jet. We are such fools, and who can blame the Chinese for taking advantage of us.
They will copy everything exactly as we gave it to them.I bet the US certifies it within 2 years.
RE: many comments
There’s no doubt the Chinese manufacturers and government steal and reverse engineer quite well but the lucky thing about all of this reverse engineering talk in the comments is that the most metallurgically demanding parts of a jet – turbine blades and vanes, are not simple to reverse engineer. The information necessary to produce them is controlled under regulation and is valuable protected proprietary information from the manufacturer standpoint. It’s not as simple as taking a pile of stolen blades and carving dimensionally identical copies out of a chunk of inconel. They’re directionally solidified single crystal parts, just the processes to achieve that took many decades of R&D and the extremely refined current state of that technology has Chinese manufacturers decades behind in turbines and struggling to catch up. Advanced aero in fans and compressors is one thing, but turbines add a whole extra level of complexity. Modern high performance, high efficiency turbine engines means high pressure ratios and high turbine inlet temperatures. It’s very demanding stuff to operate parts in an environment that would melt them in short order if they weren’t filled with cooling passages and covered in film cooling holes. That’s not even counting current CMC part development, the bleeding edge of turbine tech. I wouldn’t say “don’t worry about it because all is well”, but at the same time I don’t think you’ll be seeing any major airlines outside of china using these planes in any significant number.