Shanghai 'design power' hailed ahead of C919's maiden commercial flight
A prototype of the C919 lands at Beijing Daxing International Airport for the first time during a test flight in July.
China is about to complete an over three-decade quest to rise to the ranks of nations capable of designing and manufacturing commercial aircraft, thanks to the design power of Shanghai.
The C919, China's first domestically-developed narrow-body jetliner, will take off on its maiden commercial flight soon, the aircraft's chief designer said on Thursday. By August it had completed all test flights required for it to be awarded an airworthiness certificate from the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
It will be then delivered to its inaugural client, the Shanghai-based China Eastern Airlines, to serve passengers, said Wu Guanghui, chief scientist of Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) and chief designer of the C919.
"The birth of the C919 depended on national efforts and global wisdom, but all its designs were done in Shanghai," Wu told the first World Design Cities Conference, which opened today.
He said the design of an aircraft determines whether it is safe, comfortable, economically efficient and environmentally-friendly. "We aimed to develop a world-class product, brand and capability."
Artificial intelligence has been widely applied during the design of the C919, Wu revealed.
The innovation in its industrial design includes the aerodynamics, vacuum welding and flight simulations, using supercomputing calculations and AI applications.
A prototype of the C919 lands at Beijing Daxing International Airport for the first time during a test flight in July.
With the integration of AI into the aircraft's development, the design process on supercomputing was shortened to only one-twentieth or even one-thirtieth of the usual time, Wu told WDCC.
In future, COMAC will apply more AI technologies to its aircraft design in Shanghai, such as automated aircraft screening, virtual reality and 5G, as well as unmanned printing and waste disposal.
"Some surreal scenes in the science-fiction movies are expected to become real in Shanghai with the combination of AI and design," Wu added.
In terms of global aviation, China has been thinking big from long ago.
The 125-seat Y10, China's first commercial jet, was designed in the 1970s, and flew for more than 170 hours in test flights between 1980 and 1984. But the project was scuttled before reaching commercial viability due to economic and political factors.
Despite setbacks and frustrations, China's commercial aircraft industry has never looked back. COMAC was established in Shanghai in 2008 to take charge of developing the C919 project.
Though the company is relatively new, it has developed three major aircraft types, including the C919 and the ARJ21 regional jet, which has served over 5.3 million passengers, according to Wu.
Seventy-five of the 90-seat ARJ21s have been delivered, and 601 orders have been secured from global clients, Wu said.
The simulated cabin of the CR929 wide-body aircraft.
The C919, with 168 seats and a range of 5,500 kilometers, finished its maiden test flight in May, 2017. Since then, six prototypes have rolled off the assembly line in Pudong and are undergoing testing in northwest Shaanxi Province as well as Shandong and Jiangxi provinces. The aim is for it to compete for orders with Europe's Airbus and the Boeing in the US.
The CR929 wide-body aircraft, being developed by China-Russia Commercial Aircraft International Corp, a joint venture between COMAC and United Aircraft Corp of Russia, will have 280 seats and a range of 12,000 kilometers.
"The CR929 has officially entered the design stage and suppliers for the jet's body and tail structures have been selected," Wu said.
The double-aisle jet, which is planned to be ready for test flights in 2025 and delivered to airlines from 2028, will more widely use composite materials and be 10 percent more economically efficient than its competitors.
To be assembled in Shanghai, it will be able to operate over 95 percent of global routes, according to Wu.
The CBJ business jet refitted from the ARJ21 regional jet.
China Eastern has purchased the first batch of five C919s, thus becoming the jet's first operator.
The carrier and its subsidiary airlines plan to deploy the C919s on its most popular domestic routes from Shanghai to Beijing's Daxing airport, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in south Guangdong Province, Chengdu in southwest Sichuan, Xiamen in southeast Fujian, Wuhan in central Hubei and Qingdao in east Shandong.
Hongqiao International Airport will become the future operational base of the C919s.
China Eastern also established OTT Airlines in February 2020, mainly to operate China's domestically developed passenger jets. The carrier signed a contract with COMAC in August 2019 to purchase 35 ARJ21-700 regional jets.
It also signed a purchase intention for 20 C919s in 2010 and has thus been named as the world's "launch operator" of the aircraft.
