COMAC C919

vincent said:

Those are military planes that generates razor thin profits for the manufacturer and the planes generate no income thus PLA can only buy small number of them over time. Commercial companies use C919 to make more money so they have an incentive to acquire them at a faster pace.

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Agreed and YES they have to ... but as far as I remember even long back it will the first aircraft that HAS to be build in substantially larger numbers per month than any other aircraft before.

The question is; how will they manage this?

Deino said:

Agreed and YES they have to ... but as far as I remember even long back it will the first aircraft that HAS to be build in substantially larger numbers per month than any other aircraft before.

The question is; how will they manage this?

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Build more factories and hire more workers?

That seems to be how every manufacturer in the world does it.

One problem all of the new entrants (MS-21, C919, MRJ) face in ramping up is that they depend on many of the same specialized (Western) suppliers as Boeing and Airbus do for the 737/A32X families, which will soon be built at a combined rate of 1400 a year. If there is a bottleneck (and these unprecedented rates are sufficiently challenging without taking on more customers), the newcomers will be the first to feel it because no supplier will want to strain relations with the two biggest and most reliable OEMs

Even for the domestic parts we are talking about a limited pool of highly skilled labour that cannot be expanded at the drop of a hat - the task of getting production up to speed should not be underestimated.

Airplanes are ordered years in advance. I find it hard to believe suppliers don't know what their order books look like in the next ten years

Tell that to P&W or Zodiac (though P&W largely dropped the ball on technical issues)...

Also, orders are regularly swapped (between variants in a family or occasionally even across families - a widebody for 3 narrowbodies for example), trimmed or raised and deferred according to airline capacity slumps and jumps. Some aspects of the configuration (interior fitting options such as galley layout, seats and inflight entertainment, sometimes even engine selection) may only be firmed up quite a while after the airframe order was placed. Some slots are reserved speculatively, with an eye toward later selling the delivery positions to another customer (so there is no point in nailing down a defined configuration until you know where the airframe will end up).

Their planning is a lot more volatile than you might imagine.

Tirdent said:

One problem all of the new entrants (MS-21, C919, MRJ) face in ramping up is that they depend on many of the same specialized (Western) suppliers as Boeing and Airbus do for the 737/A32X families, which will soon be built at a combined rate of 1400 a year. If there is a bottleneck (and these unprecedented rates are sufficiently challenging without taking on more customers), the newcomers will be the first to feel it because no supplier will want to strain relations with the two biggest and most reliable OEMs

Even for the domestic parts we are talking about a limited pool of highly skilled labour that cannot be expanded at the drop of a hat - the task of getting production up to speed should not be underestimated.

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As is now the domestic content of C919 is 60% I have no doubt that by the time C919 enter production the domestic content will be raised dramatically aside from engine.Right now they are busy putting together joint venture! Well some of them already running

There is still plenty of time before C919 enter production I estimate 2 or 3 years

Some clear photos from the second prototype's first test flight...

Is this the last and final test before the real maiden flight on Friday?

Live: Second C919 takes trial flight in Shanghai

Airborne! Congrats to COMAC.