Kina ruller ut sin Comac C919 - AVweb video

China's C919: Big Hat, No Cattle

By Paul Bertorelli

Somewhere in the not-that-distant past, the rollout of a new airliner morphed from a simple tow out of the hangar to polite applause into industrial theater with a cast of thousands. Give China’s COMAC—the government-owned consortium responsible for commercial aircraft—credit for nailing the theater part, albeit with a slight party twist not of the balloon and noisemaker variety. See the video of the COMCAC C919 unveiling this week here. When I saw the rollout, I immediately knew who to ask about this interesting airliner’s potential on the world market. Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group is our go-to guy for such questions. Will the C919 offer meaningful competition for the likes of Boeing’s 737MAX or the Airbus 320NEO? Aboulafia was blunt. “None whatsoever,” he replied in a return email. He sent along this link offering his full analysis. I’ll summarize. While we’ve been entertaining ourselves with news stories about the huge potential for aviation in China, the country has quietly become the hottest market for new western airliners but has gone backward in its ability to manufacture aircraft to meet its burgeoning needs. As Aboulafia notes, rather than building up its expertise as a global supply chain partner, China has instead distracted its focus with ambitious certification projects for which it lacks experience and technology. In the aerospace manufacturing sector, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission, China sold $482 million in parts and structures for all U.S. aircraft primary manufacturers in 2014. That’s less than half of Mexico’s output and but 10 percent of Japan’s $4.86 billion. China’s growth was only 5.9 percent over its 2013 totals. Aboulafia says structures and component supply chain work is the best way to build a foundational aerospace sector because it’s more profitable and less risky than major cert programs like a single-aisle airliner. In other words, walk before you expect to run.   The C919 is reportedly finding strong demand in China but this might be just so much PR spin. Chinese airlines have a decidedly strong taste for western airline technology to the extent that 20 percent of Boeing’s new business is in China. Airbus is doing well in China, too, but Teal finds that opening up a manufacturing center there didn’t help much. Since it started assembling aircraft in Tianjin in 2009, Airbus has increased its annual compound order growth rate in China by 10.9 percent, while Boeing posted an 18.5 percent growth rate during the same period, without the trouble of building manufacturing facilities there. Because China still hasn’t figured out how to protect intellectual property rights—something that seems utterly foreign to the culture—the C919 is not likely to enjoy the latest in avionics technology, which means it will be a shadow of the 737MAX or the 321NEO. In his book, China Airborne, author and pilot James Fallows described the complex and arduous process China will have to follow to become a world aerospace power. Although China has shortcutted to dominance in other manufacturing fields, the difficulties of international certification and global reticence to trust the country to respect intellectual rights will present the Chinese with a rutted road. And even if they gain the expertise to manufacture to near current global standards, Aboulafia points out that new market entrants have almost no chance of success. He points to Bombardier’s struggling CSeries as a case in point. And Bombardier has demonstrated that it knows how to build airplanes. Meanwhile, the personal and bizjet sector is doing no better. An aviation CEO I know recently returned from China’s Aviation Expo and reported that although training activity is high, sales of personal aircraft have dropped to near zero. Anyone with money, evidently, is lying low to avoid getting whacked by China’s aggressive anti-corruption program. Nothing like a little fear to put a chill into buying that new Cirrus you had your eye on. As an aside, he reported that AVweb is blocked to internet users in Beijing and Chengdu but appears to be available in Xi’an. Maybe it was something I said. But as Fallows pointed out, one hallmark of a vibrant aerospace industry of global dimension is the unfettered exchange of information. Including this crummy little blog.