Russian president Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing in June last year to meet with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang about facilitating the transfer of Russian space technology to the Chinese government, but the trip served a larger purpose.
By signing an agreement on intellectual property protections in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Putin and Li set the stage for the two countries to work together on a wide range of industrial partnerships, including a new commercial aircraft poised to give Airbus and Boeing the first serious challenge in the widebody market since the last delivery of the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 in 2001.
Within five months of the Russia-China agreement, Comac displayed at the Zhuhai air show a model of a new widebody emblazoned with the logos of Comac and United Aircraft Corp. It displayed a fuselage with four exit doors, like the Boeing 777-200, and flared wingtips a bit like the Airbus A350-900. A joint venture — CRAIC — to develop and produce the 280-seater was announced on 23 May in Shanghai, the future final assembly site of the Chinese-Russian collaboration.
Development of the new project is officially underway within a unique binational collaboration. The forces driving the two nations to partner seem clear. China inherits Russia’s historic experience in widebody construction and modern understanding of advanced composites and state-of-the-art flight controls. Russia, meanwhile, leverages China’s vast resources and access to a market expected to order thousands of widebody aircraft over the next two decades.
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Making the partnership work could be tricky. It must survive through the 40-year lifecycle of a typical commercial aircraft programme, including the development phase. That’s enough time for a project to endure wild swings in economics and politics.
“That’s a good question and I think this will be a unique experience unlike anything else [among] strategic partnerships,” UAC president Yury Slyusar tells Flight Daily News during a recent interview in his Central Moscow office.
In Slyusar’s view, the economic and industrial interdependencies between China and Russia should make for an enduring partnership.
“Our industries are adding to each other technologically and financially and the markets complement each other,” he says. “It’s a good combination of Russian industry and Chinese industry, not just a political partnership. But we really need each other. That’s why we have the competence that, combined, will proceed us to success, I hope.”
Russia and China have a long history of aerospace collaboration, but never on such an equal footing as with the CRAIC joint venture. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union supplied China with military aircraft, some of which the Chinese copied, such as the Xian H-6 bomber developed from the Tupolev Tu-16. Political friction between Moscow and Beijing suspended further co-operation until the mid-1990s, when a cash-strapped Sukhoi brokered a deal to deliver Su-27 fighters to the Chinese air force. But the partnership cooled again after China again reverse-engineered the Russian technology to produce similar models.
In the wake of Western sanctions imposed on Moscow after 2014, Russia again turned to China as a political and economic partner, allowing UAC to broker a new deal for 24 Su-35S fighters for Beijing. There was also talk of setting up a joint venture to develop and produce a 38t-class heavy lift helicopter, but a deal finally settled on a Chinese-led project with Russian technological assistance.
As a result, the commercial widebody has become the symbol of the new strength of Sino-Russian collaboration. For the first time, Chinese and Russian engineers will jointly collaborate on a new aircraft development programme as organisational equals.
In Shanghai, CRAIC will establish the widebody project’s headquarters, commercial operations and final assembly line. In the Moscow region, UAC will establish a joint design centre based in the southeast suburb of Zhukovsky, a historic flight test and aerospace research centre.
The project also offers an opportunity to advance Slyusar’s objective to unify UAC’s widely dispersed engineering resources. UAC was formed more than a decade ago to consolidate Russia’s aerospace design bureaus and manufacturing houses for fixed-wing aircraft under a single corporate entity. Several UAC design bureaus, including Tupolev, Ilyushin, Sukhoi and Yakovlev, have experience designing and producing new commercial aircraft. For the first time, the design of a new commercial aircraft will be led by UAC, rather than one of the design bureaus.
“We call it a unified or united design bureau, which is ultimately UAC,” Slyusar says. “UAC is distributing the work among the design bureaus, and, of course, it’s Sukhoi with its experience of designing civil aircraft, and Tupolev and Ilyushin. Everyone will be involved to some degree.
"And obviously Irkut will be involved in it extensively because they have about 2,000 engineers working on MC-21 right now. In total, about 16,000 work in designs bureau in the corporation and that’s why all of them could take part in this project.”
Last November, Chinese and Russian officials established the roles each country will play in the development programme. Chinese companies will design the fuselage. UAC will design the wing and the empennage, most likely using the liquid resin infusion process used to fashion the composite panels and wingbox for the MC-21.
The task now is to select the suppliers for the multitude of systems and avionics, including engines, hydraulics, flight computers and landing gear. Chinese and Russian suppliers are hoping to compete for tier one-level assembly work, but UAC and CRIAC have made it clear that they intend to cast a broad net for the most competitive technologies. GE Aviation and Rolls-Royce have responded to a request for proposals for the engines, although Russian and Chinese indigenous engines are also in development.
“Everything is going according to plan. We have been meeting suppliers. Recently we met with Honeywell and GE — very interesting meetings,” Slyusar says.
Source: Flight Daily News
