Some notes & quotes from recent reads:
Air China Orders 100 Homegrown C919s in Attack on Plane Duopoly
Quotes:
Air China announced plans to buy 100 Comac C919 airliners, a major boost to the home-grown planemaker seeking to disrupt the commercial aircraft duopoly locked down by Airbus SE and Boeing Co.
The agreement has a value of $10.8 billion, based on the list price for the C919. Deliveries will start this year and run through 2031, Air China said in a filing. The Beijing-based airline, one of China’s three biggest carriers, had previously already ordered a handful of C919s.
The move highlights how China is muscling into the lucrative market for larger commercial airliners, which for decades has been evenly shared by Airbus and Boeing. While the C919, which is similar in size to the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 family of jets, isn’t yet certified to fly passengers outside of China, industry experts expect the model to grab market share in the next decade, particularly as Airbus and Boeing are sold out for years on their most popular models.
Notes:
The passenger (and cargo) jet market has long been split nearly evenly between US-based Boeing and Europe-based Airbus, but the former’s wave of care-related failures (and consequent slow-downs and shut-downs of its capacity, as regulators look into those issues) has opened up a window of opportunity for China’s version of the same, which still isn’t really sellable beyond China’s market at the moment, but which could become so as airlines start to become desperate to replace aging models and expand their fleets, those efforts hamstrung by existing undersupply from both major manufacturers, and Boeing’s ongoing problems (which are amplifying that undersupply).
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