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How China Learned to Build an Airliner

Sino Despatch 18 min read
Hand-painted watercolour illustration of a white C919 narrow-body airliner standing on the apron outside COMAC’s final assembly hangar at Shanghai Pudong in pale morning haze, with a second airframe in yellow-green primer on work platforms inside the open hangar, small workers in overalls, and red silk ribbons and lanterns marking a delivery day

On 24 September 2026 China Southern Airlines collected its thirteenth C919 at the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China’s assembly centre beside Shanghai Pudong airport. The next day it flew south to join the fleet in Guangzhou. By the counts kept by Chinese aviation watchers, that delivery brought the total handed over since December 2022 to 43, and the fleet had by then carried more than eight million passengers. Eight days earlier, and about 1,000 kilometres to the north, Airbus had delivered the first A320neo from its second Chinese assembly line in Tianjin. Both events describe Chinese aviation in 2026. China now builds, certifies and flies a modern single-aisle airliner of its own, yet still buys most of its jets from Europe and America, and its own aircraft carries a great deal of Western hardware. This piece explains how the C919 was built, who supplies it, how it was certified, how airlines are using it, and what it does and does not mean for Boeing and Airbus.

An earlier post, The Airport That Came Before the Aircraft, told the story from the runway’s side: China built its airports and airlines first, and its own airliner arrived last. This one looks at the aeroplane and the industry behind it.

Three Attempts Before the C919

The C919 is not China’s first try at a large passenger jet. The first was the Shanghai Y-10, a four-engined airliner built in Shanghai in the 1970s. It resembled the Boeing 707, first flew on 26 September 1980 and made long demonstration flights, but never entered airline service. Funding dried up in the early 1980s, when the government decided China would learn more, and more cheaply, by working with foreign manufacturers.

The second attempt was exactly that. Under an agreement signed in 1985, McDonnell Douglas supplied kits and Shanghai assembled 35 MD-80-series jets, and the factory learned how a Western production line, its quality paperwork and its inspections worked. A follow-on plan to build MD-90s in China was cut back to a token run. The third attempt, a 100-seat airliner to be developed with Airbus in the mid-1990s, collapsed in 1998 over cost, the size of the market and how much technology would actually be shared.

What survived these false starts was a smaller project. In 2002 China launched the ARJ21, a 78-to-90-seat regional jet. It first flew on 28 November 2008 and did not enter service until 28 June 2016, with Chengdu Airlines, after a certification campaign that dragged on for years. COMAC renamed it the C909 in November 2024; 186 had been delivered by the end of March 2026, including exports to Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam. The ARJ21 was slow to arrive, but it taught Chinese engineers and regulators how to take a jet through a full Western-style certification.

A Company Built for One Aeroplane

COMAC was founded in Shanghai on 11 May 2008. Its shareholders were the central government, the Shanghai city government and large state firms, among them the military aircraft group AVIC. Its main job was to build a single-aisle jet in the class of the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, which carry most of China’s air passengers. The regional jet project moved into the new company, and the C919 programme was launched that year.

The early timetable promised a first flight in 2014 and service in 2016. In December 2009 COMAC chose the CFM International LEAP-1C as the engine. CFM is the Franco-American joint venture of GE and Safran, and its LEAP family also powers the A320neo (as the LEAP-1A) and the 737 MAX (as the LEAP-1B). An application for a type certificate went to the Chinese regulator in 2010. Work on the first flight-test aircraft began at Pudong at the end of 2011.

The schedule slipped, as first airliner programmes nearly always do. The first aircraft was rolled out on 2 November 2015. It flew on 5 May 2017, as B-001A, from Pudong, for about 80 minutes. Five more test aircraft followed, and flight testing across several Chinese bases, covering heat, cold, high altitude and icing, lasted until the summer of 2022.

What Kind of Aircraft It Is

The C919 is deliberately conventional: a low-wing twin-jet with a single aisle, six seats across and engines under the wings. It is 38.9 metres long with a wingspan of 35.8 metres, and its fuselage is 3.96 metres wide, slightly wider than the A320’s. It seats 158 in a typical two-class layout and up to about 174 in a dense one. China Eastern’s aircraft have 164 seats, eight of them business class. The standard version has a design range of about 4,075 kilometres and the extended-range version about 5,555. That covers almost any route inside China.

The main structure is aluminium alloy, with aluminium-lithium and carbon-fibre composites in selected parts. The supercritical wing, shaped to delay the shock waves that form at high subsonic speeds, was designed in China, and Chinese engineers count it among the programme’s main achievements. The aircraft cruises at about Mach 0.78. Airlines are not buying it for radical fuel savings but as a familiar kind of aeroplane with a Chinese name on the type certificate.

The Main Manufacturer and Its Suppliers

COMAC works the way Airbus and Boeing do. It designs the aircraft, integrates its systems, carries out final assembly and holds the certificate, and buys most components from specialist suppliers, a model Chinese officials call “main manufacturer plus suppliers”.

Most of the structure is Chinese. In a supplier list compiled for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington in 2020, the wing components come from Xi’an Aircraft Industry, the nose sections from Chengdu Aircraft Industrial, the forward and aft fuselage barrels from Jiangxi Hongdu, and the tail, rear fuselage and engine pylons from AVIC’s Shenyang commercial aircraft arm. These firms also build China’s military aircraft, and several had long made parts for Boeing and Airbus.

The systems that keep the aircraft flying are mostly Western, or come from joint ventures between Western and Chinese firms. The CSIS list includes Honeywell for the fly-by-wire flight control system, air data and inertial reference systems, auxiliary power unit and wheels and brakes; Parker for hydraulics, fuel systems and flight-control actuation; Collins Aerospace for cabin management and weather radar; Liebherr for bleed air and, through a joint venture in Changsha, the landing gear; and Michelin for tyres. The integrated modular avionics, the computer core that ties the flight deck together, come from Aviage Systems, a joint venture of GE and AVIC. The electrical wiring is supplied by a Safran–COMAC joint venture, the nacelles by Nexcelle, and the engines by CFM.

Counting the top suppliers by region, CSIS found 82 major ones: 48 American, 26 European, six from elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific, and 14 Chinese, seven of which were joint ventures with foreign firms. Measured by value, estimates differ. Chinese state media have said about 40 per cent of the parts are imported; Western analysts put the foreign share higher. Much depends on whether an American-designed system built in a Chinese joint-venture factory counts as foreign or domestic.

None of this is unusual for an airliner: Airbus buys American engines and avionics, and Boeing buys Japanese wing structures. What is unusual is the politics. Because the C919’s key systems come from American firms, Washington can slow the programme, and in 2025 it did. In late May, during a tariff dispute, the US government suspended licences that allowed GE to ship LEAP-1C engines and related technology to COMAC. On 3 July 2025 the suspension was lifted and shipments resumed. The pause lasted about five weeks, but it disrupted a line planning a steep ramp-up. The supply chain has also drawn the attention of security services: in 2021 a Chinese intelligence officer was sentenced in the United States to 20 years in prison over a plot to obtain GE engine trade secrets.

Certified at Home

A new airliner needs a type certificate, the regulator’s ruling that the design meets the airworthiness rules. The C919 was certified by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), against Chinese transport-category rules that closely follow the American and European standards. The CAAC issued the type certificate on 29 September 2022, after more than five years of flight testing. A second document, the production certificate, which allows COMAC to build further copies under approved quality control, followed on 29 November 2022.

China Eastern took delivery of the first production aircraft, registered B-919A, on 9 December 2022. It first flew about 100 hours of proving flights with airline crews. On 28 May 2023 it flew the type’s first commercial service, MU9191, leaving Shanghai Hongqiao at 10:32 with 128 passengers and landing at Beijing Capital at 12:31, where fire engines gave it the customary water salute. The next day it began regular service between Hongqiao and Chengdu Tianfu.

A CAAC certificate is enough inside China and in countries that accept it. Most of the world’s airlines, lessors and banks want approval from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) or the US Federal Aviation Administration as well.

The European Question

COMAC has applied to EASA to have the C919’s Chinese certificate validated under the aviation safety agreement the EU and China signed in 2019. Validation is neither a fresh certification nor a rubber stamp: EASA examines the design, the test evidence and the approving regulator, and can ask for changes.

The process has been slower than COMAC hoped. In April 2025 EASA’s executive director, Florian Guillermet, said the agency had told COMAC it would not reach a decision that year and that the work could take another three to six years, which points to somewhere between 2028 and 2031. Since then there has been visible progress. EASA test pilots flew the C919 from Shanghai in late 2025, and in January 2026 the agency publicly confirmed it had carried out test flights as part of its “validation activities”. Analysts at the aviation consultancy IBA describe this as the third of four stages. In July 2026 the South China Morning Post, citing two people familiar with the process, reported that the European pilots, who had been flying the aircraft hard, including deliberate stalls, had found “no major hardware risks”. The same sources cautioned that the end of flight testing did not mean certification was close, because data analysis and paperwork still had to follow.

American approval looks further off still, so Europe is the likelier route to wider acceptance; many regulators in Asia, Africa and Latin America follow EASA’s lead. The Brunei start-up GallopAir, which signed for C919s and ARJ21s in 2023 and again at the 2026 Singapore Airshow, shows the problem: a foreign airline can sign a letter of intent at any time, but cannot fly the aircraft until its own regulator is satisfied.

How the Airlines Use It

So far the C919 is flown mainly by China’s three big state-owned groups. China Eastern was the launch customer. Air China and China Southern received their first aircraft together at Pudong on 28 August 2024. By the end of May 2026 China Eastern had 16, Air China 11 and China Southern 10, with one more aircraft used by COMAC for demonstrations. All three added more over the summer.

The airlines use the aircraft on busy domestic routes between large cities. IBA counted 46 domestic routes across the three operators by mid-2026, with China Eastern alone flying the type on 19 routes from 16 airports and having carried more than four million passengers on it. When China Southern marked two years of C919 service in September 2026, it had 12 aircraft based in Guangzhou and Changsha, serving 17 destinations from Shenyang in the north to Sanya in the south. It had flown more than 15,000 flights and 35,000 hours with them and carried 2.13 million passengers. Chinese reports say its engineers completed the type’s first in-depth C-check, a heavy scheduled inspection, in 20 days.

On 12 August 2026 Air China flew the C919 on its first scheduled international service, from Beijing Capital to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, a trip of a little over two hours. An aircraft certified and registered in China can fly into another country with that country’s permission, so the route needed no European approval.

What is still missing is independent evidence on how well the aircraft performs in service. Western airliners have records from hundreds of operators on reliability, fuel burn, maintenance costs and resale value; the C919 has three years of mostly unpublished data from three related customers. The price is also hard to judge. A 2022 China Eastern stock exchange filing gave a catalogue price of 653 million yuan, about $99 million, but as with Airbus and Boeing, airlines rarely pay catalogue prices. Its second-hand value, which matters greatly to lessors, is unknown.

The Production Problem

The main constraint on the C919 is no longer the design or the regulator. It is production. COMAC entered 2025 talking of as many as 75 deliveries. The year ended with roughly 15, or between 13 and 16 depending on who did the counting. The engine licence suspension was one cause, despite stocks of engines and parts COMAC had built up. Shortages of skilled workers, slow suppliers and the ordinary difficulty of raising output on a new line contributed too.

The three big airlines planned to take a combined 33 C919s in 2026. Only three arrived in the first quarter. The pace picked up in the spring, paused again in August and resumed in late September, leaving about 11 delivered in 2026 by the end of that month. Reports have described finished aircraft parked at Pudong waiting for engines, and others painted in airline colours waiting to be handed over. IBA expects about 28 C919 deliveries for 2026, rising to more than 90 a year by 2030. COMAC’s own ambition, according to IBA, is much bigger: 150 aircraft a year by 2028 and 200 by 2029, supported by a second final assembly line and a 44 billion yuan capital injection from eight state-owned companies.

The scale of the gap is easy to see. Airbus builds A320-family jets at roughly 50 to 60 a month and is working towards 75 a month by 2027, on assembly lines that include two in Tianjin. Boeing was cleared by American regulators in 2025 to build 42 737s a month and has been working towards 47. COMAC’s total C919 deliveries for 2025 were smaller than Airbus’s A320-family output in a typical fortnight. Even 200 a year would be less than a quarter of the rate Airbus is aiming for.

A Family and an Engine

COMAC is turning the C919 into a family. On 29 July 2026 a shortened “plateau” version flew for the first time from Pudong, for one hour and 59 minutes. It has a shorter fuselage and modified systems for high-altitude airports such as those on the Tibetan plateau, where thin air reduces thrust and lift. A stretched version with about 210 seats is still on the drawing board. Chinese regulators are also considering rules that would let the C919 use 30-metre-wide runways, which would open more regional airports to it.

The bigger long-term change would be a Chinese engine. The CJ-1000A, developed by the state-owned Aero Engine Corporation of China, is meant eventually to replace the LEAP-1C. It has been flight-tested as one of the four engines on a Y-20 military transport used as a flying test-bed, a story touched on in this site’s post on the Y-20 fleet. Chinese reports in 2026 have said the engine is in the final stage of Chinese certification. Analysts quoted by the Straits Times expect domestic certification and first deliveries in 2027 or 2028 and mass production around 2030, with international approval further off. Fitting it to the C919 means re-certifying the engine controls and the airframe-engine combination, a large task in itself. As earlier posts on China’s lithography push and its bullet trains describe, China has repeatedly built whole industrial systems first and then replaced the last imported components one at a time.

Beyond the C919 is the C929, a wide-body with 280 to 440 seats and a range of about 12,000 kilometres. Air China is the launch customer. IBA reports that its first fuselage is due in September 2027 and that its engine has not yet been chosen.

What It Means for Boeing and Airbus

For the next several years the C919 is little threat to the duopoly’s sales, because China needs far more aircraft than COMAC can supply. Airbus’s latest forecast says China will need 8,830 new passenger aircraft over the next twenty years, more than a fifth of world demand. COMAC’s own 2024 forecast says 9,323 jets, 6,881 of them single-aisle. Even if COMAC reached 200 C919s a year from 2029 onwards, it would supply no more than about half of China’s single-aisle demand over that period. China Eastern, the C919’s biggest operator, had 393 A320-family aircraft at the end of August 2026, more than twenty times its C919 fleet, and took delivery of the first Tianjin second-line A320neo in September. Airbus’s Tianjin plant has assembled more than 800 A320-family aircraft since 2008.

The effects are real but less direct. First, the C919 gives Chinese airlines and the state a domestic alternative, which strengthens their hand in negotiations with Airbus and Boeing. Second, the order book is large and steady. The three big airlines alone have more than 300 firm orders, and COMAC reports more than 1,000 orders for its C909 and C919 combined. Most come from Chinese customers, so the main effect is to take part of China’s future demand out of the market Airbus and Boeing compete for. Boeing, whose deliveries to China have repeatedly been held up by trade disputes, is more exposed than Airbus, which assembles inside China. Third, the experience COMAC is gaining with every C919 will matter later, for the C929 and for a possible future single-aisle design.

Outside China the outlook depends almost entirely on Europe. Until EASA validates the C919, IBA argues, its realistic market abroad is closer to that of smaller regional jets than to the full A320 market. After validation, the C919 could become a third option for airlines in Southeast Asia, Africa and elsewhere, especially for carriers with close ties to China or difficulty getting early delivery slots from Airbus and Boeing, whose order backlogs stretch years ahead.

The historical comparison is Airbus itself. The A300 entered service in 1974, and Airbus needed more than twenty years, a range of models and strong government backing before it was selling as many aircraft as Boeing. It got there with a family of aircraft that airlines found cheaper to operate, reliable production and certification everywhere. COMAC has the government backing, a home market, a certified aircraft in service and an engine in development. It does not yet have the production rate or the international certification.

What Has Been Achieved

Taken at its own measure, the C919 is a substantial achievement. China designed an airliner, put it through a full certification campaign, set up a production line, trained crews and mechanics, and has flown more than eight million passengers on it without a serious accident. Only a handful of countries have done this with modern jet airliners, and China managed it after three earlier attempts failed, about fifteen years after COMAC was founded.

What the C919 is not, yet, is a fully Chinese aircraft or a mass-produced one. Its engines and many of its systems come from American and European firms, and it is built at a rate measured in dozens a year rather than dozens a month. Both are being worked on, through the CJ-1000A, joint ventures and a second assembly line, and both will take years. In the meantime China will keep buying Airbus and Boeing jets in large numbers while gradually adding more of its own. Whether the C919 eventually becomes a real third competitor in the global market depends on how fast COMAC can raise production and when Europe validates the aircraft.

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