China’s largest aircraft manufacturer had a banner day at the opening of the country’s pre-eminent air show, as flag carrier Air China signed a preliminary agreement to buy the company’s yet-unseen widebody jet and a slew of orders came in for the narrowbody models already flying commercial routes.
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The deal, finalised on Tuesday at the China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, marked a milestone in Beijing’s quest to break into an industry dominated by two Western producers – Airbus and Boeing – and send planes of its own on long-haul international flights.
An eventual purchase order would make Air China the first client for Shanghai-based manufacturer Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China’s (Comac) 280-seat planes, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Thursday.
The widebody jet, which has not yet received airworthiness certification or seen the unveiling of a prototype unit, is being built to compete with the Airbus 350 and Boeing 787 families in terms of flight distance.
Comac expects the C929 to be able to fly as far as 12,000km (7,456 miles) – longer than the distance from Beijing to New York – and has set 2027 as a deadline for making deliveries to customers.
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The state-owned company, founded in 2008, also took a number of orders on Tuesday for its narrowbody C919 and the smaller regional C909 jet. The smaller plane, formerly known as the ARJ21, has been officially rechristened to better line up with the naming conventions of its larger brethren.