At the 54th Paris Air Show 2023, taking place in the Paris suburb of Le Bourget from 19 to 25 June, the Chinese aircraft manufacturing corporation COMAC showed a large photo of the CR929 wide-body jetliner, which lacks the United Aircraft Corporation’s logo on board.
The CR929 was developed by CRAIC (China-Russia Commercial Aircraft International Corporation), a joint venture set up by COMAC and UAC in spring 2017. The letter R in the airliner’s name just indicated Russia’s participation in its development. The 2019 plan was to test the airliner between 2023 and 2025, with deliveries in 2027. In 2018, COMAC reported that the first aircraft could be delivered to a customer in 2025.
However, with increasing pressure on Russian civil aviation and the inclusion of UAC and Irkut Corporation on US and European sanctions lists, the project began to stall. There was friction in the development team over the choice of suppliers. The Chinese partners insisted on the wide involvement of well-known Western companies that already supply China with equipment for the C919 medium-range aircraft, while the Russian partners persuaded them to use components produced in China and Russia as much as possible, including the proposed PD-35 engines.
In 2020, the Asia Times wrote that work on the CR929 project was being hampered by serious conflicts between Beijing and Moscow. The project faces turbulence arising from disputes over the design and specifications of the airliner. Beijing seeks to draw on Moscow’s technical expertise and actively imports technology, while Russian design bureaus and defence contractors see China as a new source of revenue. The wide-body aircraft project has been delayed as Chinese and Russian participants argue over technical specifications, according to a newspaper article.
After February 24, 2022, the project faces the real prospect of a complete halt. Denis Manturov, head of the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade, said last summer that due to sanctions against Russian civil aviation and due to the restrictions that COMAC has on cooperation involving Western manufacturers, the project would be reformatted to involve only Russian and Chinese manufacturers during the second half of 2022.
At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said at the plenary session of the Engineers of the Future forum that Russia was not satisfied with the progress of CR929 development and its share in the project was being reduced.
The officials’ statements implied that the airliner project is in for a serious overhaul. And in the fall, Wu Guanghui, chief scientist at COMAC, told the World Design Capital 2022 conference in Shanghai that the development of the CR929 aircraft has almost begun anew. “The overall technical shape of the aircraft has now been defined, suppliers for the fuselage and tail sections have been selected and we have officially moved on to conceptual design,” said Wu Guanghui.
But the designers reached the conceptual design stage as early as 2017-2018. The Chinese official’s revelations indirectly prove the freezing of work after 2018 and its resumption in 2022 practically from scratch. Meanwhile, for 2023, the Russian government has allocated nearly 900 million rubles for the development of the aircraft, and there are no plans to finance the CR929 from the Russian budget for subsequent years.
The demonstration at Le Bourget of a picture of the airliner without the UAC logo indicates that Russia has actually withdrawn from the CR929 project, while retaining the letter R in the name indicates continued cooperation with COMAC in terms of development, testing, manufacturing and supply of the composite wing for this aircraft. Denis Manturov said at the end of December 2022 that UAC may move from a co-developer to a supplier of components. He then said that the next negotiations with COMAC will be held in the first quarter of 2023, following which a decision on further participation in the project will be made. It is now clear that further development of the aircraft will only be carried out by the Chinese side.
The commercial success of the modern passenger airliner lies in the three most important components of its design – the wing, the engines and the avionics. The engines for the CR929 will be supplied by Rolls-Royce (Trent 7000) or General Electric (GEnx). The same companies currently working with COMAC on the C919 project will supply the avionics and other components. COMAC will design and manufacture the composite fuselage itself. But to produce a composite wing of high aerodynamic quality, the Chinese designers are not yet able to produce it, otherwise they would have already designed it for the C919.
The only enterprise in the world aircraft building industry that has the competence and the whole technological chain of composite wing manufacturing, which uses large-sized integral power structures, is Ulyanovsk CJSC “AeroComposite”. And in order for the future aircraft to be able to compete with the B787 and A350 on an equal footing, it must have a wing that surpasses these aircraft in aerodynamic quality, otherwise all the advantages of high-tech engines will be lost and the economics of the aircraft will become unattractive for carriers.
Based on the above, the prospects for the CR929 airliner look roughly as follows. The aircraft, as a commercial product, will be available between 2028 and 2030. First and foremost the airliner will be oriented towards Chinese air carriers. Taking into consideration the fact that the world civil aviation market demand for wide body aircraft is significantly lower than the demand for narrow body aircraft with long range, the market share taken by the CR929 will not exceed 10-15 percent. Russia will not buy this aircraft, as it will have problems with spare parts supply and airworthiness – the sanctions against Russia will last a very long time.
