China’s C919 aircraft to roll off the line faster as developer expands capacity, but reliance on engine imports risks ‘bottleneck’
- Construction firm under C919 maker Comac announces plan to build a big new construction zone in Shanghai, with an assembly plant and parts warehouse
- As recent high-profile domestic purchases of the home-grown passenger jet have seen the order backlog swell, analysts weigh in supply-chain hurdles
With big orders for the home-grown C919 flying in, China’s chief maker of civilian aircraft has a lofty plan: make the narrowbody planes faster.
Annual production will be expanded – possibly up to 150 in the coming years – to help meet domestic demand for the relatively new passenger jet, giving it a bigger boost in its bid to carve out a piece of the global duopoly long maintained by Airbus and Boeing.
But while the plane’s manufacturer, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), has plenty of runway to step up production, analysts say that securing engine imports and other parts from the West could prove a more difficult undertaking.
A construction services firm under Comac’s parent company said on Monday that it had secured a bid to build a “phase two” aircraft construction zone spanning 330,000 square metres (3.55 million sq ft) in Shanghai. The project was also said to include an assembly plant and a parts warehouse.
“Completion of the project will meet the future mass-production needs of the C919 aircraft … and provide a strong guarantee for the commercial operation and market competition of domestically produced large aircraft,” the construction services firm said via WeChat, China’s ubiquitous social media platform, before the post was inexplicably deleted.
Nonetheless, the news quickly spread online and sparked discussion.
