We expect the Chinese government to place more emphasis on the C919 and our forecast has been increased as a result, assuming geopolitical tensions don’t disrupt its supply of western parts.

The C919 is a 150/180-seat single-aisle jet developed by China's COMAC. It is in the same size class as Airbus's A320neo and Boeing's 737MAX 8. In November 2023, COMAC unveiled two new variant concepts of the basic C919, a shrink to 130 seats and a stretch to 210 seats. Additional details were released in June 2025 at the Paris Air Show.

Launched in 2008, the C919 uses General Electric Leap-1C engines as well as many other western sourced systems and components. It made its first flight in May 2017 and the first aircraft entered service with China Eastern in 2023. A total of 28 C919s have been delivered to four Chinese operators. Noting the accelerating deliveries last year, we significantly upped our 10-year C919 production forecast compared with the previous year; at the beginning of this year we hiked it again.

As of September 2023, COMAC claimed to have 1,016 orders and options for the C919 although there isn’t publicly available corroboration. Furthermore, it’s hard to tell how many of these are firm orders. All except the GECAS (now AerCap) orders have come from Chinese entities. Most of these Chinese orders have come from financial houses, rather than airlines.

While the Chinese hope to be able to market the C919 globally, we see only limited prospects for the aircraft outside China. The primary reason is that the technology is unlikely to be able to compete with the Airbus and Boeing single-aisles. The C919 is hobbled by requirements that, as described by Wu Guanghui, the C919’s chief designer, “COMAC will choose international suppliers through bidding, but priority will go to foreign suppliers that design and manufacture products with domestic companies.” This means Western suppliers will have needed to give away technology to play on this jet. It also means that this aircraft is designed by people whose hands have been tied. Jetmakers need to be free to select “best-in-class” content for their jet from a wide range of suppliers with no permanent links to the primes. That is the essential reason why the industry is increasingly global. Counter to this, the Chinese Government has provided very little freedom to source globally.

Right now, it’s difficult to tell what kind of Western technology is going into this jet. Some of it certainly sounds impressive, but appearances can deceive. As fearful Western suppliers bid last generation equipment, it will wind up like the ARJ21, now called the C909. Like the C919, the ARJ21 regional jet was touted as proof that China would be the next big jet maker. Instead, it has turned into an overweight and stunningly obsolete product that has no relevance outside of China’s tiny regional airline sector. In fact, the ARJ21 looks like too much of a failure to have any use in China at all. Since the C919 is being created with the same approach (and the same players) the best that can be hoped for here is that the C919 isn't as big a disaster as the ARJ21.

But what if global aviation competition is secondary, or irrelevant for China? What if the real objective is to create acceptable substitutes for Western equipment, after both sides turn their back on a robust trade relationship? Worse still, what if that moment has arrived?

Our latest thinking is that this is indeed the case. It does not matter that there will be further delays, or that this will be a last-generation product with questionable product support. China and the West are economically decoupling. Jet markets will follow that pattern. By the end of the decade, the C919 will begin to play a growing role in meeting China’s aviation needs.

So, all industries in the West, aviation and otherwise, might want to pay close attention to the country’s aviation plans. Once they close the borders to Western jets in favor of their own planes, one of the last arguments against free trade with China will vanish. In other words, the C919 will play an outsize role in determining what happens next between China and the West.

With its ambition to grow its aviation sector, we expect the Chinese government to place more emphasis on the C919 and our forecast has been significantly increased as a result. With the first 24 aircraft delivered, we expect that production will mimic that of the ARJ21, with single digits in the initial years followed by a pretty steady ramp up into the 2030s. To support this run up, we expect that the 737 MAX (not to mention the rest of Boeing’s commercial line) will continue to face restrictions in China. And despite its local production, we’ve come to assume that Airbus’s A320 is probably not immune either.

However, there is a down-side scenario for the C919 in all this that is not reflected in our forecast. With so much of the C919 being reliant on western systems and components, as geo-political tensions mount, some amount of western arm twisting should be expected. How that manifests itself will probably never be fully transparent, but should China resist, the C919 will falter. China may try to indigenize the C919, but that will take a lot of effort and delay and certainly make the aircraft even less than attractive to both Chinese and non-Chinese operators alike.