No take-off imminent for China’s aircraft sector, panel discussion in Washington told

Aviation industry experts have cast doubt on China’s ambitions of developing an indigenous aircraft sector to rival industry behemoths Boeing and Airbus, at a time when the country is actively seeking to nativise technological industries in the face of an escalating trade war with the United States.

Foreign aerospace companies provide many of the crucial avionics and engine systems for state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China’s (Comac) delay ridden C919 airliner, which is currently under development. In a sign that Comac is seeking to remedy this reliance, the company is pursuing the development of Chinese built turbofans to replace the aircraft’s foreign built engines.

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But accelerating the development of Chinese designed engines was not a realistic prospect, said Douglas Harned, managing director and global aerospace specialist at investment research company Bernstein. “The engine and the avionics – those are the most difficult things to do.”

Speaking on the sidelines of a panel discussion on China’s aircraft industry at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Harned said on Thursday that Comac would be “lucky” to “deliver 20 aeroplanes by 2025 or so”, which would pale in comparison to the more than 150 units Boeing and Airbus supply to the Chinese market each year.

There have certainly been significant breakthroughs in China’s home-grown aircraft industry in recent years. Comac’s ARJ21, China’s first domestically produced regional jet, went into service in 2016, while its larger, narrow body C919 successfully completed a maiden flight last year.

But, despite these milestones, expectations of international competitiveness have been somewhat dampened by a relatively inactive usage cycle of the ARJ21 by its sole operator, Chengdu Airlines, and a testing process for the C919 that has been plagued by delays.