China has excluded Russia from the joint wide-body aircraft project, that has been in development since 2017, with the aim of creating a competitor to Boeing and Airbus.
One can definitely mark the difference now. In th eyear 2017, 'COMAC C929' was named 'CR929' (C denoted China and R was for Russia), but now the the letter 'R' is removed and it is being advertised as C929.
It was evident after the Chinese developer of the aircraft, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), at the Le Bourget Air Show in the summer of 2023, started presenting the new aircraft as its own Chinese development.
It is reported that the Russian aviation giant United Aviation Manufacturing Corporation (UAC) has withdrawn from the wide-body passenger aircraft development partnership with COMAC.
As a result, the company has stopped mentioning Russia as a country participating in the project and is now promoting the aircraft with a capacity of 280 passengers as an exclusively Chinese development.
In 2022, after the start of the war in Ukraine and the introduction of Western sanctions against the Russian aviation industry, China decided to abandon all Russian developments in the CR929 and replace them with Western ones.
COMAC forecasts that the widebody project will be put into service between 2026-2027 and the C929 model is expected to have three different variants.
While C929-500 variant with a capacity of 250 passengers will have a range of 14,000km, C929-600 variant with a passenger capacity with 280 passengers will have the range of 12,000km, and the longest version of the model, the C929-700 with 320 passengers is expected to fly upto 10,000km.
The project has already been hampered by delays from the start, and after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine last year, Russia's aerospace industry was heavily sanctioned by the United States and its allies, unable to meet China's technical needs and lacking the funds to invest in research and development, so that it could play a limited role in CR929.
Some other sources say that the Russian side is dissatisfied with the intervention of Western technology in this passenger plane and has chosen to withdraw.
On the program development, the C929 aircraft has entered its detailed design stage, Qi Xuefeng, deputy general manager from the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), said during a recent meeting updating progress on the new aircraft model.
Wu Guanghui, the chief designer for the domestically developed C919, claimed that carbon emissions for the widebody C929 model will be cut by 60 percent compared to the older models.
COMAC’s narrowbody aircraft — C919, that took 14 years in development , and intended to compete with the popular Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 models, began its commercial operations earlier this year with China Eastern Airlines.
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