REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE COPY OF AEROSPACE MANUFACTURING BY VISITING: WWW.AERO-MAG.COM 20 AEROSPACEMANUFACTURING | SEPTEMBER 2011


AIRCRAFT PROGRAMMES I COMAC C919


its first flight next year, much of the relevant detail for the COMAC aircraft is still unannounced and the partners appear to be running at somewhat different speeds.


Behind the great wall Probing this aircraft programme from the outside in an attempt to determine its real shape is difficult. The Chinese are, as ever, inscrutable but are also presenting a set of apparent contradictions. Martin Craigs, president of Aerospace


The COMAC ARJ21twin-engined regional airliner: The final assembly line for this aircraft – and the C919 – will be ready next year


specifically for C919. Another variant of this high efficiency propulsion system has also enabled the A320neo. AVIC subsidiaries have been allocated


the various sections of the aerostructure. Xi’an is taking charge of the mid-fuselage and the performance critical areas of the airframe contained in the centre wingbox, outer wingbox, wing panels, flaps, spoilers and ailerons. Hongdu and Shenyang are making the front and rear fuselage sections and Chengdu the nose section. The final assembly line for both C919 and ARJ21 will be ready near Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport next year and by 2016 is expected to be capable of producing 20 C919s and 50 ARJ21s annually. The most likely material choices


are for a metallic fuselage and largely composite wing, although this is still open to some speculation. A strategic relationship already exists with Bombardier through the manufacture of Dash 8 and more recently CSeries fuselage sections in Shanyang, the latter using the new generation of aluminium lithium alloys. Bombardier vice-president, Ben Boehm has publically linked the C919 and CSeries programmes through the coordination of materials supply to achieve greater economies of scale, but whilst the CSeries is well into prototype production and predicting


Forum Asia, admits that the project is still shrouded in a fair amount of mystery: “There seems to be a misalignment of belief that just by throwing money and talent at the issue that there will be an instant maturity, that the company will acquire the necessary intangible soft skills of aircraft integration. “The last experience Chinese industry


had of creating a large civil aircraft was with the Y10 project some thirty years ago, which was widely believed at the time to be a reverse engineered B707. The design of the C919 is vastly different, but the commercial realities are the same. Like the Y10, you can’t make it less fuel efficient per passenger than comparable aircraft and pretend it has some value in a competitive marketplace. In the grand scheme of things, within a country that will now put human beings into space, that is less of an issue, but the measurement is not the ‘wow’ factor of a brand new shiny-looking product, but in its total reliability and lifecycle operating costs. There is such a mass of competences that must be accumulated in successful integration.”


The whole, therefore, is not necessarily


greater than the sum of the parts. It is easy to imagine that somewhere in a hangar near Shanghai there is a big pile of state-of-the-art aircraft systems, but there is less evidence of the capability of bringing it all together. COMAC has yet to demonstrate its ability as a prime. It has not visibly gone through the whole prototype, technology gestation and succession of demonstrators process that can be seen with those it regards as global competitors – it seems to be just ‘buying the bits’. Even with the engagement of world class tier one partners this needs to be handled at the prime level. The parts all have to work together effectively, efficiently and above all safely. The 90,000 hour economic lifetime cited by COMAC will be hard to achieve without a basis in well matured and integrated technologies. Off the record, many of the OEM


partners are experiencing frustrations with the way their relationships have developed as COMAC seems to be proving a difficult partner to work with.


“The measurement is not the ‘wow’ factor of a brand new shiny-looking product, but in its total reliability and lifecycle operating costs.” Martin Craigs, president of Aerospace Forum Asia


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44