The cavernous building that is to house the final assembly line of China’s own passenger plane is virtually empty, except for an enormous Chinese flag and slogans to rally the workers who are one day to produce the C-919.
It is a huge engineering challenge, but, if the project proceeds on schedule, a prototype of the single-aisle plane will take to the skies by the end of next year.
Its mission is to compete with US aircraft maker Boeing’s 737 and the A-320 of European consortium Airbus. The vast 300m-long hangar where it will be put together, next to Shanghai’s Pudong airport, can hold six planes at a time.
Photo: AFP
Despite the ambitious goal, the first major parts have yet to arrive, journalists saw on an exclusive tour of the new production facility — the first for foreign media.
The plane’s builders, the Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (COMAC, 中國商用飛機), said they recognize the issues, but they have the full financial and political backing of the Chinese Communist Party and believe they will ultimately be successful.
“We will try [for the first flight] at the end of next year,” said Zhang Zhengguo, of COMAC’s publicity team.
Total spending on the project is unknown.
Chinese airlines will need nearly 6,000 new planes valued at US$780 billion over the next 20 years, according to Boeing, and the Chinese government wants some of the huge market to go to its own passenger plane.
China has dreamed of building its own civil aircraft since the 1970s when Jiang Qing (江青), former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) last wife and a member of the notorious “Gang of Four,” personally backed an attempt to do so. However, the Y-10’s heavy weight made it impractical and only three were ever built.
Now China is the world’s second-largest economy. It has built an auto industry by leveraging joint ventures with foreign companies for technology, developed the world’s largest high-speed rail network and sent humans into orbit.
A patriotic song specially commissioned for COMAC compares the C-919 to a “Great Wall in the sky.”
The roar of jet engines from Boeing and Airbus planes flying over the sprawling factory serve as a reminder of the technological complexities involved.
“We are like a child, Boeing and Airbus are adults,” said another COMAC official, who declined to be named. “We may fall down, or walk unsteadily.”
Although China claims the C-919 is self-developed and manufactured, foreign companies are playing key roles in the project by supplying systems as well as newly developed engines made by French-American venture CFM International.
The narrow body plane, with a range of up to 5,555km, can seat a maximum of 174 passengers, according to COMAC.
The first major C-919 part to be completed, a single forward fuselage piece, came off the assembly line at a factory in the central province of Jiangxi in May, state media reported.
At a separate sub-assembly line in Shanghai, there are signs of life as workers put together the Spanish machinery to make the central wing box — which secures the wing in the body — and the horizontal part of the tail.
Banners on the wall speak of “storming the gate” and “eating bitterness,” echoing political slogans from China’s past.
At a development center for the project, the C-919 exists only as a model of the cockpit and the “iron bird,” a flightless testing platform for control, landing gear and other systems. The project received a boost in May when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited the company and sat in the model’s pilot seat.
“We must, and will, make our own large jetliner,” he said, according to state-run media.
COMAC already claims 400 orders for the C-919, most from domestic leasing companies and only one from a foreign customer, GE Capital Aviation Services — a subsidiary of General Electric, the US firm that co-owns engine provider CFM.
A smaller regional jet also under development, the ARJ-21, has 253 orders, but first deliveries have been delayed by years.
Airlines remain reluctant to order the C-919 while it has not been certified by the US Federal Aviation Administration, a crucial step which would enable it to fly in US skies and assure passengers about its safety.
However, Marwan Lahoud, director of strategy for Airbus, said: “The Chinese threat should not be taken lightly.”
“The Chinese will make good aircraft and will sell them,” he told France’s Tribune newspaper this week. “We will not be able to compete with the financial packages they will be able to offer airlines. Only our technological lead will preserve our advantage.”
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”