China’s large passenger jet C919 successfully completed the world’s first commercial passenger flight from Shanghai Hongqiao Airport to Beijing Capital Airport on May 28. China Eastern’s first C919 jumbo jet will begin regular commercial operation on the Shanghai-Chengdu Tianfu route from May 29, and will be gradually expanded to more routes as the aircraft is introduced.

The successful “maiden flight” of the C919 carrying commercial passengers marks an important moment in the history of China’s aviation industry. For Chinese people, while applauding and cheering for the C919 to enter official operation, they must look forward to the gradual mass production of domestic large aircraft, so that more passengers can travel on “China’s own aircraft”.

This involves when large – and medium-size domestic aircraft will be mass-produced. On the supply side, the C919 is not Comac’s first delivery. Currently, the company has three aircraft manufacturing product lines, namely ARJ21, C919 and CR929. After the successful test flight in November 2008, the ARJ21 obtained the production license from the Civil Aviation Administration of China on July 9, 2017, marking that this type of aircraft entered the mass production stage. Following the C919 project, China signed a memorandum of cooperation with Russia on the New Long-range wide-body Airliner Project in May 2014. The CR929 adopts a dual-aisle cabin layout, has a range of 12,000 kilometers and a seat class of 280. Currently, three types of basic, shortened and extended versions are designed. This means that China will produce three major aircraft to meet the diversified needs of the aviation service market.

On the demand side, global orders for the C919 have reached 1,035 aircraft, while China’s aviation service market is still in a period of rapid development. Although China has just purchased 160 Airbus aircraft at a total price of $20 billion, it still cannot meet the needs of market expansion. It is estimated that between 2021 and 2040, China’s aviation market will receive 9,084 passenger jets with a 50-seat class or above, worth about 1.4 trillion US dollars, among which 6,295 single-aisle jets with a 120-seat class or above will become the world’s largest single aviation market. For the C919, the commercial space is huge.

More importantly, the C919 marks the “first step” for China’s aviation industry to scale up. Just as Boeing has an important influence on the high-end manufacturing industry in the United States, it not only has 16,000 patents and 160,000 employees, most of whom are blue-collar medium and senior technologies, but also more than 20,000 suppliers, most of which are in the United States. It not only supports the aviation, national defense and other fields, but also is the largest export enterprise of the United States.

Similarly, through the design and development of the C919, China has mastered 5 big categories, 20 majors and more than 6000 civil aircraft technologies in the civil aircraft industry, driving the cluster breakthrough of technologies in the fields of new materials, modern manufacturing and electronic information, and improving the level of the structure, airborne systems, materials and standard parts of the domestic commercial aircraft. It is expected that by 2035, the industrial supporting facilities formed by the large aircraft Industrial Park will support the annual production capacity of more than 200 large commercial aircraft of ComAC, form supporting industries for design and development, technological innovation, production and manufacturing, marketing, airline operation, maintenance and product dismantling, and drive the annual output value of the aviation industry to more than 300 billion yuan.

Structure attribute and value attribute will be generated in the complete aviation manufacturing industry chain. The structural attribute is that the entire industrial chain is composed of manufacturing enterprises responsible for different segments. Manufacturing enterprises in each field reach the product standards of C919 by deep understanding of relevant manufacturing processes and technologies. The products produced by enterprises in various fields are matched with products in other fields, enabling C919 to complete procurement localization and continuously improve the domestic production rate of core components. Not only can bring cost advantage, but also can avoid congestion.

Professional division of labor and enough orders can enable relevant enterprises to continuously reduce production costs, deliver more cost-effective products, and improve market competitiveness. At the same time, with the increase of production orders of C919, the downstream “cake” of the whole industry will become bigger, attracting more new enterprises, capital and talents to join, and competing for orders through better products and technical quality, promoting the development of innovation ecology of the whole industry chain, making China’s aviation manufacturing industry chain in a virtuous circle of expanding cluster scale and accumulating cost and technological advantages. This is the value attribute of the industrial chain.

In this regard, we have had successful experience in many industrial fields, such as the promotion of the industry chain of new energy vehicles by the domestication of Tesla and the new force of car manufacturing. In terms of the law of development, China’s aviation industry takes C919 and other domestic large and medium-sized aircraft as the starting point of development, and continuously promotes the industrial chain to cover more related fields, which can bring higher industrial coupling degree, lower production cost and higher production efficiency. It can not only fully meet the needs of domestic large and medium-sized aircraft, but also participate in the competition of the world aviation manufacturing industry. It occupies the middle and high-end of the industrial chain and provides services to the aviation industry of more countries and regions.

The C919 marks the “first step” in the scale of China’s aviation manufacturing industry, pointing to the complete industrial chain from small to large, and constantly stronger. On the one hand, it will create a large number of jobs and bring more choices to China’s aviation market. On the other hand, it will promote China’s manufacturing industry to make breakthroughs in high-end, sophisticated fields and accelerate the transformation and upgrading. This is why it is called a national treasure.