What is the status of C919 project?

C919 has now been in service for over a year. China Eastern Airlines is now operating 7 aircraft. How is the project progressing? Well, I think the big moment was when Air China (CA) and China Southern (CZ) took delivery of their first C919 last month.

As ithome reported, both Air China and China Southern are expected to take delivery of 3 aircraft this year. On top of that, China Eastern will take 6 C919s in total and Hainan subsidiary Suparna airlines will take delivery of its first C919. Will we actually see 13 C919s to be delivered this year? We will have to wait and see. They will probably get to 2 deliveries per month by Q4.

The near term goal is to reach 30 deliveries per year and then 50 per year.

Chengdu Aircraft Corporation (CAC) is one of the primary supplier for C919’s cockpit/head section. Recently, it has built a pulsating production line for this. According to report, this production line has already reached target capacity of 50 unit per year. It is fully of AGVs and domestic robotics.

Xian 兴航 high end industrial machine has now substituted foreign equipment in HAIG's work in C919 skin parts & fuselage. 兴航 is developing different CNC machine tools, skin stretching machines & other type of precision machine tools to build different part of C919 fuselage. Looks like it has already delivered enough of these machineries to produce up to 75 C919s per year. HAIG is in charge of the large portions of C919 fuselage.

All of the above shows that production is ramping up among the suppliers. Their production lines are ready for up to 50 C919s per year. It’s just a matter of COMAC managing its supply chain, getting its assembly center ready for mass production, flight testing and aircraft delivery.

We can see that the C919 project is not only developing a domestic supply chain for commercial airliners, but also elevating domestic producers of the precision machineries needed by those suppliers and final assembly. Just as J-10 & J-20 raised the entire aerospace industry in China, C919 is doing the same with the knock on effect of lifting up rest of the high end manufacturing industry and hard sciences.

But beyond production and supply chain, are the aircraft themselves performing as the airlines would like? Well, it’s been a slow start for C919 since it first flew commercially for China Eastern (MU) last year. MU seems to be an extremely cautious airline. Initially, the first C919 was only doing 1 round trip between SHA and TFU every day. It was only after second and third C919s joined service, did they start adding more routes and doing more legs per day. Even then, MU often gave aircraft “days off”. As in, a particular C919 did not see any flying because it was likely undergoing maintenance and checks. While this does make sense in the first few months of a new aircraft type, this practice of resting an aircraft once a week still seems to be continuing now.

Interestingly enough, Air China (CA) seems to be far more aggressive in its C919 usage than MU. In fact, it put C919 into service almost 10 days before China Southern (CZ) is. CZ is not expected to have first commercial C919 flight until the 19th. This week, CA did the first flight between PEK and SHA:

Since then, this first C919 is already doing 4 legs per day and up to 10 block hours, including return flights between PEK and SHA as well as PEK and HGH.

In airlines world, LCCs often doing up to 12 block hours per day for their A320s and B737s. However, legacy airlines with multiple fleet types do fewer block hours than that. I would not be surprised if 9 to 10 hours per day is close to what CA operates on its A320s and B737s. As such, C919 can comfortably replace 737s down the road.

In airlines industry, it is very important for aircraft to have high availability and be constantly in the air. The variable cost of operating a flight is just a portion of the overall aircraft cost. The fixed cost of owning or leasing an aircraft as well as maintenance and servicing contract is quite high. As such, airlines are incentivized to keep their short haul aircraft in the air as long as they are flight worthy. Being able to fly C919 for up to 10 hours per day with 98%+ availability is critical.

As you can see with the flight map below, we are now seeing up to 5 MU C919s and 1 CA C919 in the air at the same time.

If we look at a recent day of C919 actions, we can see that MU is still resting 1 of its C919 aircraft. On the aircraft that are operating, they are mostly doing 4 legs of 2.5 block hours or 3 legs of 3 block hours per day. As such, it’s block hours per day for an operational C919 is probably 8 to 9 hours. Not bad, but also still need to be raised further.

Overall, C919 is slowly becoming a reliable aircraft. I do not follow the program closely enough or have access to high quality sources to know the availability rate or maintenance cost or anything like that. I also do not know how much the big 3 airlines in China fly their other narrow body aircraft. I do think that much progress has been made in the past year.

COMAC is still slowly increasing its production rate. But at least the aircraft that are in service are transitioning nicely to become reliable part of the fleet. The following steps for COMAC should be to increase C919 production and achieve more supply chain security through developing domestic suppliers and producers.

Aside from that, COMAC is still looking to achieve EASA certification. It is also looking to open up offices in other parts of the world. All of this is very important for exporting C919s to global south countries.