China’s state-owned aircraft maker had just announced the Western engine it had chosen for its new aircraft. One month later, in January 2010, American cyber researchers started to see the “preparatory activity” of a Chinese hacking group focusing on an American turbine company that made a part needed for jet engines. For years afterwards, a division of China’s intelligence apparatus could be seen trying to steal engine design information from Western companies.

By 2017 and 2018, the US government had opened indictments – with convictions to follow – against figures in the US and China trying to steal Western aerospace information. The subterfuge, now largely forgotten by the public, is an essential chapter in the origin story of the C919, which was developed to compete with two of the world’s most widely used passenger aircraft – the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320neo. It was also the foundation of establishing the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) as a serious player in the global commercial aviation market.

The C919 is now in regular production, and it’s taking its first steps in aiding China’s systematic efforts to both develop its aerospace industry and to produce a viable passenger aircraft. But years after concerns were raised over Chinese intellectual property theft, few of the affected parties are keen to talk openly about the alleged cyber-espionage.

Repeated attempts to contact COMAC by this masthead were unsuccessful. And Western aerospace parts makers have been quiet too. Not even Crowdstrike, the US company that wrote the pivotal 2019 report spelling out China’s cyber activities around Western aviation, was willing to discuss it.

China’s habit of acquiring foreign technology, absorbing it and then re-innovating it for export has been seen with smartphones, wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar panels and high-speed trains. So it’s not a complete surprise that the C919 narrow-body jet looks like the peers it seeks to compete with.

The C919 is designed to carry from about 158 to 192 passengers, close to the same capacity as Western planes such as the Boeing 737 MAX 8 and the Airbus A320neo. The Boeing and Airbus planes have a range of more than 6300 kilometres, while it’s estimated that the C919 has a range of about 5500 kilometres.

Meanwhile, Western companies have not turned their back on the Chinese market. COMAC’s C919 programs have forged ahead with the help of international companies and global supply chains. The C919 has been designed in Shanghai with its fuselage, wings, flags and ailerons made in China. Much of the complexity of a jet is in the innumerable onboard systems.

Estimates vary on how much of the plane is actually China-made, with figures suggesting up to 60 per cent of the plane’s components come from Western aerospace companies such as Collins Aerospace, GE Aerospace and Honeywell. The C919 flying today still doesn’t use China-made engines. Not yet, anyway. It uses the CFM LEAP 1-C, an engine co-produced by GE Aerospace and France-based Safran.

The pace of production of the C919 has been slower than anticipated. COMAC planned its first flight for 2014, but the plane was repeatedly delayed, and the first flight was not until 2017. Its first commercial flight took place in 2023.

Shanghai-based China Eastern Airline now operates 10 C919s on routes between Shanghai and Beijing and Shanghai and Hong Kong. The C919 is also operated by Air China and China Southern Airlines, domestic carriers the Chinese Communist Party government can direct to purchase the plane. There are reportedly 1000 orders for the C919, but so far, COMAC has only produced 10 in 2024 and a number in the teens this year.

Being a prize project of Beijing during the US-China wars doesn’t help. At the end of May, the US Commerce Department suspended some licences, allowing US companies to sell products and technology to COMAC for use in its C919 aircraft, The New York Times reported.

“This is an industry with extremely high entry barriers,” Aboulafia said. “Since World War II, except for Embraer of Brazil, no company or country has successfully entered the civil jet transport manufacturing sector.”

China’s rapid industrialisation has brought with it the practice of piracy and technology extortion that challenges the legal framework and capacity of Western courts. China is big enough to essentially make its own rules around industry practices, or at least to try to, which in turn challenges the basis of patents in the West and the system of innovation that it supports.

Source: The Age.