China’s Comac wants to challenge Airbus and Boeing globally: Can it break their duopoly?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Making passenger planes is an exceptionally daunting task. There are safety requirements and complex systems, not to mention sky-high costs.

Though the pace of China’s efforts to build a self-reliant aviation industry may appear glacial, its trajectory is clear, if filled with hurdles. Comac is the state-owned aerospace manufacturer tasked with the endeavour. The majority of its customers are Chinese airlines.

Comac is starting to burnish its reputation overseas by exporting the C909, a single-aisle jet used mainly on regional routes, to markets in Southeast Asia. It’s an incremental step—by 2030, the Shanghai-based plane maker will still be a minnow next to industry giants Airbus and Boeing. But it will have begun to position itself as a credible challenger to the decades-long duopoly.

That strategy was on display at the Singapore Airshow this week. Comac brought one of its flagship single-aisle C919 planes, which can seat up to 192, as well as two of the C909, with space for 97. I was given a tour of one of the latter by Leo Budiman, vice-chairman of PT TransNusa Aviation Mandiri, an Indonesian airline that was Comac’s first foreign customer.

Demand for air travel has fully recovered from pandemic lows, but the supply chains underpinning manufacturing have not. The ongoing trade war is worsening the situation, with China cutting off access last year to rare earths widely used in aircraft electronic systems and jet engines. Airbus and Boeing are trying to increase production to meet demand.

The European plane maker reported 793 deliveries last year, while its American rival notched 600. Comac delivered only 15 C919 jets. TransNusa, founded in 2005 offering charter flights across the