China’s C919 Airliner Never Fails to Fail

A model of C919 passenger aircraft is on display during the 2022 China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing, China, on Sept. 3, 2022. VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Commentary

Samuel Johnson once said of a dog walking on its hind legs that even though it was not done well, one was surprised to see it done at all.

Such is the increasing indifference I am feeling toward China’s C919 passenger jet, Beijing’s latest effort to break into the global commercial airliner business.

The plane actually celebrated a bit of a milestone a few days ago when—five years after its first flight—it finally received its airworthiness certification from the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

It was supposed to have been certified last December, but continuing delays in flight testing made that a nonstarter. In fact, at the time, the C919 had flown only 34 out of a required 276 flights.

I know that I pick on the C919 a lot (see here and here and here), and I should really cut the plane some slack. But few countries have taken such a good opportunity to develop and manufacture a product that could have truly been globally competitive and totally screwed it up.

For a country like China, building the C919 was certainly an achievable goal. In the first place, it was not a particularly groundbreaking aircraft. Noted aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia has called the C919 a “me-too jet,” adding that the plane offers no new technology.

Certainly, the C919 is not, for example, like Embraer’s family of small regional jets. The Brazilian aerospace company pioneered the development of small but fast jet-propelled airliners seating less than 125 passengers, such as the ERJ45 or the E170/E190 series. As such, Embraer helped to revolutionize the commuter airliner business.

In fact, the C919 was, from the very beginning, a rather mediocre airplane. It is a narrow-body plane, seating around 160 passengers, which puts it in roughly the same category as two already existing workhorses of the skies, the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.

Visitors walk past a Boeing 737 (L) and a Boeing 777 (R) displayed during the Farnborough Airshow, in Farnborough, on July 18, 2022. Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

That said, there’s nothing wrong with being a manila-envelope passenger plane. There is a sizable global market for narrow-body jets, and the C919 was likely to enter as a low-cost challenger, relying on cheap Chinese labor to undercut the competition. Even if it was only sold to Chinese airlines, the potential for sales was huge.

And yet China has dropped the ball on every occasion. The C919, initiated in 2008, was supposed to conduct its first flight in 2014 and begin deliveries by 2016. In fact, it didn’t fly until 2017.

While the plane has finally received certification by the CAAC, it still needs to be separately certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Europe’s Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA) if Beijing wishes to sell the airplane overseas.

In the meantime, C919 program costs have skyrocketed, and China has reportedly already spent over $20 billion on the plane.

As a result, the unit price of the C919 has risen. Originally expected to cost about $50 million per plane, the C919 is now predicted to be priced at around $90 million to $100 million each. This is roughly the same price as a 737 or A320, wiping out whatever cost advantage it might have had.

Finally, calling the C919 “Chinese” is stretching the point. The plane relies heavily on Western suppliers for critical components and subsystems, including its avionics, landing gear, nacelles, flight controls, and—most importantly—jet engines. Around 60 percent of these foreign suppliers to the C919 are U.S. companies, such as General Electric, Honeywell, and Eaton.

In fact, it is estimated that only 25 percent of the overall value of the C919 is actually Chinese, mostly in the manufacture of the fuselage and wings, as well as final assembly.

As Aboulafia has put it, “it’s more a Western jet than a Chinese one.” Beyond simply injuring Chinese pride, this excessive dependency on foreign components and technologies puts the program in serious danger. Even if much of the Western technology is rather old—and the evidence is that much of what is being transferred to China is hardly cutting-edge—it still leaves the C919 at the mercy of foreign suppliers.

And these foreign suppliers are becoming increasingly hesitant—hostile, even—when it comes to working with the Chinese on high-tech projects. The Chinese regime’s belligerent behavior—its growing threats toward Taiwan, its regional bullying, its stifling of democracy and human rights in Hong Kong, and its failure to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine—has left many in the West with a bad taste in their mouths and increasingly reluctant to team up with China.

In December 2020, under the Trump administration, the Commerce Department added a new “Military End User” (MEU) list to its existing export controls. The MEU list essentially prohibits certain technology exports to certain entities (in China and other countries) that “represent an unacceptable risk of use in or diversion to a ‘military end-use.’” These “entities” included AVIC, the state-owned aerospace company overseeing the C919 program. The Biden administration has expanded on this hardline approach, blacklisting seven Chinese companies, in part to keep U.S. companies from exporting advanced semiconductors to China.

In the end, Beijing will likely strong-arm several Chinese airlines into buying the plane. So far, only Chinese airlines and many Chinese financial leasing companies have placed orders for the plane—but it is unlikely to be a globally competitive project. Instead, the C919 will likely go the way of many other national aircraft “vanity projects” such as Russia’s Superjet, Indonesia’s N-250, or the Turkish Regional Jet: neither technologically competitive nor economically viable.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.