Why Russia and China are forging an aircraft alliance

Le Bour­get, aka the Paris Air Show, is the bien­ni­al aero­space show-and-tell where man­u­fac­tur­ers reveal snazzy new air­craft pro­to­types, jets zoom over­head with grav­i­ty-defy­ing manoeu­vres and, most impor­tant­ly, mon­u­men­tal air­lin­er orders are signed off.

This June’s show, attend­ed by 322,000 vis­i­tors, deliv­ered the antic­i­pat­ed mix of aero­nau­ti­cal show­man­ship, aer­o­bat­ic pyrotech­nics and tele­phone-num­ber deals, with $150-bil­lion-worth of orders announced for 934 com­mer­cial air­craft.

But beyond all that there was anoth­er dimen­sion, some­thing that tran­scends com­merce and tech­nol­o­gy. It’s to do with nation­al aspi­ra­tions, for there were two con­spic­u­ous blips on Le Bourget’s radar – Rus­sia and Chi­na. 2017 is the year in which these two coun­tries indi­vid­u­al­ly and col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly assert a new stance in the aero­space are­na as they kick-start their tran­si­tion from con­sumers to con­tenders.

Chi­na has been an avid cus­tomer of West­ern-built air­lin­ers for decades. At Paris, Xia­men Air­lines, a region­al sub­sidiary of Chi­na South­ern Air­lines, signed a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing for ten Boe­ing 737 MAX 10 air­lin­ers, val­ued at $1.2 bil­lion. These will top up Xiamen’s all-Boe­ing fleet com­pris­ing nine 787 Dream­lin­ers, 149 Next-Gen­er­a­tion 737s and four 757s. The car­ri­er plans to grow its fleet to 280 air­lin­ers by 2020; impres­sive sta­tis­tics for a domes­tic air­line, dwarf­ing the fleet num­bers of most nation­al car­ri­ers.

Air­bus is also a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of China’s predilec­tion for West­ern planes with the announce­ment ear­li­er this month that Chi­na Avi­a­tion Sup­plies Hold­ing Com­pa­ny (CAS) had con­tract­ed to pur­chase 140 air­craft from the Toulouse-head­quar­tered man­u­fac­tur­er. That’s in addi­tion to the 1,440 Air­bus­es cur­rent­ly in ser­vice with var­i­ous Chi­nese air­lines.

The Xia­men and CAS orders are emblem­at­ic of the scale of growth in Chi­nese region­al avi­a­tion which is expect­ed to quadru­ple over the next 20 years. Boe­ing cal­cu­lates that by 2036 Chi­na will be the largest domes­tic air­line mar­ket in the world. And to put the sig­nif­i­cance of this into con­text, in its 2017–2036 Glob­al Fore­cast, Boe­ing iden­ti­fies that over the next 20 years there will be a glob­al mar­ket require­ment for 41,030 new air­craft, worth $6.1 tril­lion.

This slices up into 7,530 planes in Europe, 8,640 in North Amer­i­ca, 3,350 in the Mid­dle East, 3,010 in Latin Amer­i­ca, but the lion’s share will be head­ed to the Asia-Pacif­ic region where 16,050 will be deliv­ered. That’s a lot of busi­ness in China’s back­yard, which brings us to those radar blips as Le Bour­get sig­nalled what could be a dis­rup­tion of the equi­lib­ri­um of glob­al civ­il air­lin­er man­u­fac­tur­ing held by Air­bus and Boe­ing.

The alliance

Chal­leng­ing Boeing’s 737 MAX 10 and its Euro­pean rival the Air­bus A321neo, the Com­mer­cial Air­craft Cor­po­ra­tion of Chi­na (COMAC) stand at Le Bour­get pro­mot­ed its C919 air­lin­er, while Russia’s Unit­ed Air­craft Cor­po­ra­tion (UAC) plugged its MC-21 medi­um-haul jet. These Chi­nese and Russ­ian con­tenders made their maid­en flights on May 5 and 28 respec­tive­ly this year; both offer sim­i­lar con­fig­u­ra­tions to their Amer­i­can and Euro­pean coun­ter­parts.

In their domes­tic mar­kets, order books are fill­ing up as 285 MC-21s have been ordered, 50 slat­ed for Aeroflot with deliv­er­ies start­ing in 2019, and COMAC has already sold 600 C919s to 24 air­lines in Chi­na.

2017 is the year in which these two coun­tries indi­vid­u­al­ly and col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly assert a new stance in the aero­space are­na

But even more intrigu­ing on the COMAC stand was a mod­el of a Sino-Russ­ian long-range wide-body air­craft sport­ing a three-class cab­in lay­out with 280 pas­sen­ger seats. The plane’s 12,000km range aligns with the mar­ket seg­ment present­ly served by Boeing’s 787 Dream­lin­er and Airbus’s A350.

Under­pin­ning this Sino-Russ­ian col­lab­o­ra­tion is a COMAC-UAC part­ner­ship, endorsed by Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping and Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin who signed a joint ven­ture as part of a “major strate­gic co-oper­a­tion pro­gramme against the back­ground of fur­ther devel­op­ing the com­pre­hen­sive strate­gic part­ner­ship between Chi­na and Rus­sia”. The joint enti­ty is known as the Chi­na-Rus­sia Com­mer­cial Air­craft Inter­na­tion­al Cor­po­ra­tion (CRAIC), based in Shang­hai.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, ele­ments of the media have been rub­bing their hands togeth­er, quick­ly char­ac­ter­is­ing this emerg­ing sto­ry as a clas­sic East-West show­down, threat­en­ing the sta­tus quo of civ­il aero­space. But the real­i­ty is more nuanced, for in the short and medi­um term the MC-21 and C919 rely on key West­ern com­po­nents:

Russia’s air­lin­er is pow­ered by US-built Pratt & Whit­ney PW1000G-JM engines; like­wise, COMAC’s jet has CFM Inter­na­tion­al LEAP-1C engines beneath its wings. CFM Inter­na­tion­al is a joint ven­ture between America’s Gen­er­al Elec­tric and France’s Safran Air­craft Engines.

Of course, West­ern engines could in the future become mere­ly option­al if indige­nous ones become avail­able: Russia’s Unit­ed Engine Cor­po­ra­tion (UEC) dis­played its PD-14 engine at Le Bour­get, designed specif­i­cal­ly for the MC-21 and present­ly in its test­ing phas­es.

“We are going to base our fur­ther work not only on export­ing the end prod­ucts, but first­ly on tak­ing part in the export-ori­ent­ed projects; in oth­er words, co-oper­a­tion with for­eign com­pa­nies in the field of devel­op­ing engines and com­po­nents,” says Alexan­der Artyukhov, UEC’s direc­tor gen­er­al.

And that mir­rors CRAIC’s objec­tives. It recent­ly announced that it’s on a quest to pro­cure inter­na­tion­al part­ners to ensure that what is brought to mar­ket is com­pli­ant with glob­al indus­try norms.

“We will fol­low the lat­est inter­na­tion­al main­stream air­wor­thi­ness stan­dards and build more com­pet­i­tive long-range wide-body air­craft,” says Jin Zhuan­g­long, chair­man of COMAC, while his Russ­ian coun­ter­part Yury Slyusar, pres­i­dent of UAC, says the wide-body pro­gramme “is tes­ti­mo­ny to Chi­na and Russia’s deter­mi­na­tion to engage in long-term co-oper­a­tion”.

CRAIC says it will car­ry out glob­al bid­ding based on mar­ket-ori­ent­ed and stan­dard­ised prin­ci­ples, and pro­vide pri­or­i­ty to sup­pli­ers that are more expe­ri­enced, can pro­vide com­pet­i­tive prod­uct and are will­ing to share the risk dur­ing devel­op­ment through local invest­ment or joint ven­tures.

Becom­ing tech­no­log­i­cal­ly self-suf­fi­cient might be a long-term objec­tive, but for now Rus­sia and Chi­na appear intent on col­lab­o­rat­ing beyond bor­ders with part­ners that have the com­pe­tence to raise the qual­i­ty and com­pet­i­tive­ness of their air­lin­ers. And that has to mean greater choice for pas­sen­gers world­wide.