China’s audacious plot to rule the skies

New Year’s Eve celebrations were on course to be a largely calm affair in Beijing. Yet while thousands of worshippers visited the Yonghe Temple to light incense sticks and pray for good fortune, Chinese officialdom seemed determined to set off fireworks elsewhere.

A senior figure from the state-backed Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) was dispatched with orders to talk up the regime’s grand plans to conquer the world of aviation with its first homegrown passenger plane. The ploy was intended to send a resounding message to the West.

China is pushing forward with its plans to take on Boeing and Airbus.Credit: Getty Images

With the heavily subsidised C919 firmly established on domestic routes flown by China’s three big state-owned carriers: Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines, Comac laid down the gauntlet to Western rivals with an announcement that it had quietly opened offices abroad.

The next step would be to seek overseas certification to enable the aircraft to fly well beyond the country’s shores as Beijing steps up its plot to break Airbus and Boeing’s iron grip on the global commercial jet market. The company hopes to gain approval from European regulators as early as this year, Yang Yang, a Comac marketing executive, told Shanghai government-affiliated news site Jiemian.

The prospect of a Chinese-built plane smashing an Airbus-Boeing duopoly that has existed for decades is regarded with strong scepticism by many leading industry experts. Described in less questioning quarters as a potential “Boeing-killer”, Brendan Sobie, an industry consultant, says: “The C919 is not going to kill anyone.”

Yet despite widespread doubts about China’s aviation prowess, Beijing’s ambitions stretch further still as it seeks to one day produce a plane that has been assembled without any Western components.

With the C919 a familiar sight in the skies above mainland China, Comac’s engineers have begun work on an even more grandiose project: the country’s first indigenous commercial jet engine.

The programme is part of President Xi Jinping’s drive to make China less dependent on Western imports – a quest given greater urgency by the return of Donald Trump to the White House, armed with a pledge to make China the primary target of a fierce new trade war.

Dubbed the CJ-1000 – the CJ initials standing for Chang Jiang, the Chinese name for the Yangtze River – the plan is for a made-in-China design to replace the imported American-French Leap engine that is currently found in the C919.

Here, Comac will be up against an equally powerful and exclusive club, whose expertise stretches back to the Second World War. The commercial jet engine market is dominated by four international behemoths: FTSE 100 titan Rolls-Royce, $US160 billion ($255 billion) American rival Pratt & Whitney, its US cousin General Electric (GE) and France’s state-backed Safran through a tie-up with GE.

The programme is part of President Xi Jinping’s drive to make China less dependent on Western importsCredit: Getty Images

Still, some industry figures caution against writing off Beijing’s chances too prematurely. With the delivery of jet engines plunged into disarray by the global supply chain aftershock of the pandemic and yet to fully recover, China at least has its timing right.

“There is space for the Chinese to come in and exploit this,” says Shukor Yusof, an independent consultant.

“Pratt & Whitney is vulnerable and although Rolls-Royce is the blue blood of manufacturing, they have had trouble too. The resilience of the engines that are being made ... is not what it used to be. There’s been a degradation in the quality.”

The revival of Rolls-Royce under the unflinching stewardship of “Turbo” Tufan Erginbilgic, has been heralded as the work of a turnaround master.

‘It has to convince airlines that it can support them with parts, servicing and maintenance. You can give the plane away for free but if the economics and the support are bad then it doesn’t matter.’

Aviation industry consultant Brendan Sobie

However, after a meteoric six-fold surge from less than £1 to 570 pence since he took over at the start of 2023, the share price has flatlined in recent months amid questions over whether Erginbilgic has really got to grips with the company’s engine delivery problems.

Both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have blamed maintenance issues with Rolls’s Trent 1000 model for their decision to ground hundreds of flights and axe routes. The chaos continues to put thousands of holidays at risk, including to key destinations such as New York and Cape Town.

Meanwhile, Pratt & Whitney has been hit by a massive recall and inspection crisis after the discovery of faulty parts in its engines. At one stage, a third of the planes propelled by its engines were grounded.

Engine delays have compounded a supply chain crisis that has swept through the aviation industry. Long-standing concerns about Boeing’s planes have led to many being taken out of action, while a production squeeze at Airbus means prospective customers face waiting more than a decade for new orders.

Yusof claims the engine makers are as guilty of taking their eye off the ball as the plane manufacturers.

“Rolls is a company that was truly world-class but they lost it,” he says. The sector is suffering from a “lack of investment – in research and design. They’re not putting in enough money to develop new technology ... they’re just tinkering with engines made 10, 15, 20 years ago.”

Rolls insiders acknowledge that the company rested on its laurels but insist that is no longer the case. “There was a time just before Covid, and during [the pandemic] when some of that blue-sky research was put on the back burner ... but we are now able to invest as much as is needed to stay ahead of the stuff the Chinese have done,” a senior Rolls source says.

China’s track record of successfully gatecrashing other high-tech industries is further reason to believe it could one day build Rolls-Royce-beating jet engines.

“China isn’t a country we should underestimate. In other areas they’ve proven a lot of people wrong in a very short period of time ... in electric vehicles and [micro] chips and just about anything that they’ve set their minds to,” Yusof says.

“Who would have thought you’d have a BYD [Chinese carmaker] showroom in the heart of Mayfair?” one senior business figure adds.

Faith in Beijing’s vision has prompted several major Western companies to seek deeper commercial ties with China. After a major streamlining exercise, FTSE 100 aerospace engineer Melrose has reduced its footprint from 50 factories around the world to 30.

Three of those are on the Chinese mainland and its plant in Jingjiang, operated under a joint venture with Comac, is equivalent to the size of “10 football pitches”, according to Peter Dilnot, the chief executive, making it the biggest in the company’s reshaped portfolio.

Fresh investment up to $US200 million is planned in the facility, “the vast majority of that coming from Comac and the local authorities to ramp up production”, in return for Melrose providing “the technology and the know-how” Dilnot says.

Rolls-Royce has been grappling with quality issues. Credit: Bloomberg

“China is a huge market, it’s growing quickly, it’s strategically important and it’s where many of our customers are going too.” he adds.

Some believe production limitations will prevent China from ever being able to service the global export market. It took 15 years to get the C919 off the factory floor and into the air. One aerospace boss points out that Comac’s ambition is to build 150 planes by 2028 compared with a production rate at Airbus of 75 of its 320 models every month.

“The numbers they are going to build are just not significant enough,” Sobie says.

The consultant believes Comac’s ambitions will be further held back by concerns among prospective customers about its ability to service the planes it makes and sells.

“It has to convince airlines that it can support them with parts, servicing and maintenance. You can give the plane away for free but if the economics and the support are bad then it doesn’t matter,” Sobie adds.

Richard Aboulafia, of the consultancy Aerodynamic Advisory, thinks the entire project is doomed to failure. The very concept of going it alone in such a high-tech industry is fatally flawed, he insists.

The best that China can hope for is “a second-rate, homegrown engine” that would power Chinese planes, Aboulafia believes. Compared to their Western counterparts, these aircraft would come with “lower reliability, higher fuel burn and operating costs and uncertain product support,” he says.

Research conducted in 2022 by the Hunan provincial government found that the most common problem with Chinese-made jet engines was mechanical failure. Poor design, production constraints and a lack of experience with testing and assembly are also common problems, the study concluded.

“Things have to cross borders in this industry, otherwise you get mediocrity.

“If you restrict everything – the engines, the avionics, the brakes, the landing gear – to being innovated by one state-owned enterprise, you’re going to end up with one terrible fight,” Aboulafia warns.

“It’s why the C919 looks a lot like a jet from half a century ago”.

Telegraph, London

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