China’s main commercial aircraft company said yesterday that it had received 30 orders for its C919 passenger plane, bringing the total to 430.
State-backed Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (COMAC, 中國商用飛機) signed an agreement with CMB Financial Leasing Co (招銀金融租賃), a unit of China Merchants Bank (中國招商銀行), on the sidelines of the nation’s premier Zhuhai air show, according to a statement.
Financial details were not disclosed.
The order marks a vote of confidence in the C919, a 158-to-168-seat, narrow-body jet that would compete with the Boeing 737 and the A320 of European consortium Airbus SAS.
COMAC has so far announced only one order by a foreign entity, GE Capital Aviation Services, a subsidiary of General Electric Co, the US firm that co-owns the joint venture providing engines to the C919.
Workers recently started assembling the fuselage of the first C919 at a factory in Shanghai and COMAC plans the first test flight at the end of next year.
“The C919 is still on schedule now,” a COMAC spokesman told reporters.
However, with significant technological challenges, some industry officials said the project could miss that deadline.
“Production has started. There is going to be a delay in the official schedule, in my opinion,” one of the suppliers to the C919, who declined to be named, told reporters.
COMAC also announced 20 more orders for its regional jet, the 78-to-90-seat ARJ21, from Tianjin city-based Comsys Aviation Leasing Co (朗業航空租賃). The order brings the total to 278, a separate statement said.
The ARJ project is years behind schedule, with deliveries originally planned for 2009.
COMAC plans to certify the ARJ with China’s civil aviation authority before the end of the year, but approval from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is necessary before it can fly in most nations.
“The ARJ21 will get certification from CAAC [Civil Aviation Administration of China] next month,” a COMAC spokesman said.
This year’s Zhuhai air show has attracted global aviation firms to show off their wares as economic development and an expanding middle class promise a bonanza in one of the world’s fastest-growing aircraft markets.
For foreign companies, the airshow offers a chance to tap a market in which air travel grew by an annual 11 percent last year to 350 million passengers — a gold mine for plane makers such as Airbus and Boeing Co.
“This is a tremendous market,” said Briand Greer, president of aerospace for the Asia-Pacific region at US conglomerate Honeywell International Inc.
“Think about just that impact of 500 million more people flying,” he said, referring to the estimated number of people China expects to shift from rural areas to cities in coming decades.
Just days before the show, Airbus announced a US$10 billion deal for China Aircraft Leasing Co (中國飛機租賃) to buy 100 planes from its A320 family.
Crowds gathered to take photographs with the double-decker A380 superjumbo, which Airbus is showing off at the event.
The company says China is poised to become one of the world’s largest aviation markets, with Chinese deliveries already representing 25 percent of its global production.
Rival Boeing of the US forecasts that China will need 6,020 new airplanes valued at US$870 billion over the next 20 years.
Despite the optimism, industry officials see problems in the short-term: A slowdown in the economy, strict controls on airspace and a corruption crackdown.
China’s economic growth — which has a direct correlation with air traffic — eased to 7.3 percent in the third quarter, the lowest since the depths of the global crisis in early 2009.
Massive flight delays across the nation in July, blamed on military exercises, cast the spotlight on another problem — controls on airspace that leave just 20 percent of China’s skies open to civil flights.
“It is so important for China to fix their air traffic management issues, because it is starting to have economic impact,” Greer said.
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