CR929 reformatted for Russian and Chinese components
06/20/2022
In connection with sanctions against Russian civil aviation and possible restrictions against China due to Taiwan,
the project of the Russian-Chinese wide-body aircraft CR929 will be revised and reformatted only for Russian and Chinese components. About this on June 17 on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum declared Head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia Denis Manturov.
“The CR929 process is underway. But taking into account the new inputs, according to the restrictions that exist today in terms of cooperation, which was formed by Chinese partners with the involvement of Western manufacturers, this is now impossible, so you will have to spend time restructuring approaches using only Russian and Chinese manufacturers,” he said. . The Minister explained that the reconfiguration of suppliers will be completed during this year.
In December 2017, the Board of Directors of the CRAIC JV approved the results of the Gate 2 design phase. In the spring of 2018, the draft design phase, Gate 3, began. Several liner concepts were developed to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each of them, and the most acceptable liner concept was selected. In the summer, UAC and COMAC agreed on the general view of the aircraft. Agreements were reached on the main geometric parameters: wing span and shape, length, dimensions of the nose and tail parts of the fuselage, dimensions and shape of the plumage, the location of engines, landing gear and doors.
At the same time, RFP [Request For Proposal - request for proposals] was issued for all aircraft systems. In April - early May 2019, technical and commercial proposals were received from those suppliers who wanted to participate in the project. Gate 3 ended in 2019
At the Gate 4 stage, based on the results of the selection of suppliers, the integration of on-board systems was carried out, all experimental work related to the choice of the wing profile, its mechanization parameters, work to justify the choice of structural materials and related design solutions were completed. Gate 4 was scheduled to take place in 2020.
In November 2018, during the China Air International Air Show in Zhuhai, the chief designer of CR929 Maxim Litvinov said that CRAIC takes into account the potential risks from anti-Russian sanctions in its work, suppliers from Europe and the United States themselves are trying to level the political aspects that exist between countries, and itself the work is proceeding quite constructively.
“They themselves are looking for various proposals, various schemes. We, accordingly, for our part, propose how to proceed in this or that case,” he said.
On January 31, 2018, COMAC announced the completion of production tests of full-scale 15x6 meter composite fuselage panels, and at the end of December of the same year, the corporation manufactured and showed a composite prototype of its front end.
In 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, all CR929 events were moved to videoconferencing, including boards of directors. And at the end of September, the Asia Times reported that the project was stopped because serious disagreements interfered with the normal work of Russian and Chinese engineers.
The publication claimed that Russia was not going to transfer key technologies to the Celestial Empire and insisted on using the promising PD-35 engine as a power plant. In November of the same year, Denis Manturov and the Minister of Industry and Informatization of the People's Republic of China Xiao Yaqing confirmed their interest in further joint work and readiness to promptly resolve issues with the CR929 aircraft.
The PD-35 was proposed to equip the CR929 back in 2017 as an alternative to the Rolls-Royce turbofan. Then at one of the meetings on CR929 Denis Manturov told the Chinese negotiators: “Now there are two aircraft that have divided the world market - Airbus and Boeing. We are creating an alternative, they are unlikely to be happy. We will be at the finish line of creation - it suddenly turns out that for some reason these large engines did not reach - there are at least ten reasons for this.
Now the
"Chinese comrades" have also realized the need to independently develop the vast majority of aircraft systems for the ShFDMS CR929. The sanctions delay the creation of this aircraft by 2-3 years, but given the experience of developing a composite wing in Russia, the current import substitution program for the MS-21 and SSJ-New, as well as intensive work on the PD-35 engine, the CR929 project will be implemented, because that in the future, the demand for a car of this class is clearly visible not only in China, but also in Russia, even despite the fact that many wide-body aircraft were parked with the pandemic.
The Russian-Chinese project of a long-haul wide-body aircraft, which should compete with the A330 and Boeing 777 liners, started in April 2014 with a memorandum of intent to create such a machine. The agreement was signed in 2016 during the official visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to China. The project is being implemented by the United Aircraft Corporation PJSC and the Chinese COMAC through the CRAIC joint venture.
