China Facing The Skies With Many Hurdles

As it has tried to do with almost everything, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to put its finger print in the buoying field of wide-body aircraft development. During the summer of 2006, Chinese aerospace officials expressed their intentions of producing a big body, commercial airplane within a fifteen year range. The project, which is interimly known as Program ‘Jumbo’, is an integral part of China’s Five Year Economic Developing Plan.

Jumbo’s profile calls for an air platform with 150 passenger seats and a weight of more than 220,000 pounds at time of takeoff, which will make it bigger then Boeing’s 757 and in the same class of the Seattle-based companys highly successful Boeing 767 type. Plans are in the works to complete the first model and have it flying by the end of the decade.

At the same time, a parallel program designed to deliver the Jumbo’s massive engines is well underway. With full backing of the PRC, a domestic aerospace group named Avic I is developing a revolutionary turbofan engine with greater thrust than the best know western one, the CFM-56 and V-2500. But despite full monetary and an all out technical support from the government, Avic I is still a few years away from completing its first testing model. Thus, the possibility that Jumbo will be initially fitted with western-provided engines is all but assured.

China is also working on a cargo version of the Jumbo, which, according to government insiders, will come out first. The new plane will have roughly the same dimensions as Boeing’s 787.

While both programs are showing signs of promise, there are still problems associated with both projects. Although China’s two main aerospace bureaus, Avic I and II, already have long lasting experiences building parts for western planes, both companies failed to put together a commercially-successful domestic assembly line for their western-demanded products. Their main attempt, the MD-90, in which most of the newly produced ARJ-21 regional jet’s technology has derived, can be considered a monumental failure.

The only source of encouragement is China’s ability to reproduce 787 parts, which had allowed the firms currently doing the work to gain valuable experience in the handling of carbon-fiber products. Still, as good as the Chinese have become at duplicating western technologies, they, are far from the development of a reliable and efficient wide-body aircraft that can attract international interest.

Time has shown that without massive government subsidies, the nascent Chinese aerospace industry simply can not produce the much advertised Jumbo. Unfortunately for the industry, no huge government investment is on the horizon as China needs to keep up with the World Trade Organization’s strict free trade rules. There’s also another factor to consider. One that could jeopardize the entire project: technology.

For years, aluminum airframes offered a slow-moving target for aircraft development startups, which knew that even if the design was conservative, the key to their efficiency laid on their ability to buy off the shelf engines. But dramatic advances in structural design and systems done for the 787 and Airbus A350, means that no conservative design will be profitable, no matter how efficient it turns out to be.

To add more, current state-assured funding will run out before the second stage of the Jumbo program is completed. In 2009, the PRC began slashing the budgets of several, non essential projects and although no Jumbo money was touched, chances are history will not repeat itself come next July. Industry experts believe that budgetary availability for the entire cycle needs to be maintained until the production line for the Jumbo, now a few years away, is up, running and profitable. Yet another challenge for the entire enterprise is to earn a reputation as a reliable supplier.

An article by Raul Colon: rcolonfrias@yahoo.com

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