Twin-engine passenger plane has been designed to compete with the Airbus 320 and Boeing 737

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The first Chinese-built passenger jet has taken to the skies for a politically charged maiden flight that authorities claimed would propel the country into a new era of aviation.



The C919, a twin-engine airliner designed to compete with the Airbus 320 and Boeing 737, took off from Shanghai’s Pudong International airport just after 2pm on Friday and landed back there again 80 minutes later.

The symbolic flight, which the government has celebrated as further evidence of China’s rise, was broadcast live on state-controlled television.

'I am Fan Yusu': China gripped by Dickensian tale of a migrant worker's struggle Read more

“Today this is it! We have witnessed the successful takeoff!” said Yang Chengxi, a reporter for state-broadcaster CGTN, as the single-aisle jet powered into the skies over China’s financial capital.

The jet is the work of the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), a state-run company founded in 2008 with the specific mission of producing the country’s first commercially viable passenger jet – something Chairman Mao tried but failed to achieve during the 1970s.

Several of the plane’s key components are imported – the C919 features German landing gear, Franco-American engines and an Austrian interior – and one aviation analyst told Bloomberg the manufacturer’s claims to have produced a genuinely made-in-China jet were questionable.

Nevertheless, the C919’s 79-minute debut was greeted with an outpouring of patriotism and pride.

“I am very happy and proud to see the takeoff. It is very beautiful – a very smooth takeoff,” Fu Song, a Tsinghua University engineer who was involved in the project, told CGTN. “We are very proud to see that it worked.”

ChinaAviationReview (@ChinaAvReview) #C919 took off from Shanghai Pudong Int'l Airport at 1400LT. pic.twitter.com/aIHjHqj0fY

In an allusion to President Xi Jinping’s key political slogan, state media celebrated the flight as “another fulfilment of a Chinese dream”.

A presenter on CGTN read out viewers’ messages of support. “These days China can make anything,” said one. “It’s awesome!”

Gu Bin, an aviation expert from China’s Aviation Industry Cooperation, a state-run aerospace firm, predicted the aircraft would “rip a hole” in the duopoly enjoyed by Airbus and Boeing.

America owes China $1tn. That’s a problem for Beijing, and Trump knows it Read more

“For many years our country has been trying to do this, and we failed. Now, [the C919] can be compared to mainstream large passenger jets such as the Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320 in terms of its capacity and its technology and, to some extent, is even better than the latter,” he said. “I see a bright future for the C919 and its manufacturer.”



In his book about China’s aviation revolution, The Dragon Takes Flight, Derek Levine described the C919 as part of an intense government attempt to show its citizens that their country possessed and could produce the world’s most advanced technology.



The Communist party believed the “development of a large passenger aircraft would help wither emotional scars that linger in the mind of the Chinese people following the Century of Humiliation it suffered at the hands of the west”, Levine argued. He said the C919 had been created to help China “reclaim its status as a great power by developing indigenous innovation”.

The decision was also a commercial one, with Beijing hoping to reclaim a slice of its lucrative domestic aviation market from foreign companies.

Last year Boeing predicted that Chinese airlines would spend more than $1tn on new planes over the next two decades, including more than 6,800 aircraft, the majority being single-aisle planes. By 2024 China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s largest aviation market.



Before the debut flight, Comac said it had received orders for 570 C919s from 23 different customers. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, said that while the plane would initially struggle to compete with “very mature aircraft manufacturers”, such as Airbus and Boeing, it “should do well in the Chinese market”.



Levine said China would make its state-owned airlines purchase the C919, meaning it “might be harmful to current commercial aircraft producers, Airbus and Boeing”.

Additional reporting by Wang Zhen