China wants to take a bite out of the commercial passenger aviation market with the C919, its passenger jet produced domestically by state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC). State media closely follows every stage of the narrow-body aircraft’s development. The C919 made its world debut at the Singapore Air Show, just as U.S. planemaker Boeing, trying to deal with the aftermath of a faulty door plug on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, retired its commercial planes.
But COMAC could test hopes of entering the market quickly and taking advantage of Boeing’s safety problems.
In an interview with Reuters, the top official at the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said the plane was “too new for us to know how easy or difficult it will be” to certify it quickly. (EASA is the EU’s aviation safety regulator.)
COMAC originally submitted an application for European approval of the C919 in 2019, only to have the plans put on hold due to the COVID pandemic, explained Luc Tytgat, EASA’s interim executive director. COMAC then restarted its candidacy for the European approval of the C919 last November, requesting completion of the work by 2026.
“It will be a lot of work to reconnect and become familiar with what the airplane looks like today,” he explained.
The C919 received its type certificate – the de facto standard for global aviation safety – from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) in September 2022 and approval for production in November of the same year.
China Eastern Airlines has operated the C919 in China since May 2023, and this year COMAC also took the aircraft on a promotional tour across five Southeast Asian countries.
Airlines are currently facing a shortage of planes, exacerbated by Boeing’s recent safety issues. Aircraft manufacturers are still grappling with supply chain issues caused by the COVID pandemic. The director general of the International Air Transport Association, Willie Walsh, said in February that the manufacturing sector will remain stuck “for a few more years.”
Increased regulatory scrutiny of Boeing’s manufacturing process following the mid-air blowout of a door plug on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane in January will also mean fewer Boeing planes on the market. United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Emirates and Ryanair are among the carriers warning of delivery delays.
The C919 will need to be certified by U.S. and European aviation regulators before it can operate commercially in Western markets. It may take some time, although China has bilateral aviation safety agreements with both Europe and the United States. The COMAC-manufactured ARJ21, a regional jet, has been in commercial use since 2016, but has yet to receive certification from the US Federal Aviation Administration. (The ARJ21 has only one non-Chinese customer, the Indonesian airline TransNusa)
For now, neither Boeing nor Airbus – the current duopoly that controls the market – see the C919 as a near-term threat. Executives from both plane makers told CNBC in February that they viewed COMAC’s offering as similar to what is already on the market.
European carriers, for their part, do not appear to be desperate for a new aircraft. No European airline has asked EASA to speed up approval of the C919 so it can place orders, Tytgat revealed to Reuters.