China has changed its mind about building a new passenger airplane with Russia

An attempt to build the first wide-body Russian passenger aircraft since the Soviet era together with China ended in failure.

China has excluded Russia from the CR929 project, which has been under development since 2017, planning to create a competitor to Boeing and Airbus.

At the Le Bourget air show, the new 280-passenger aircraft, which was estimated to cost $50 billion, was presented as a Chinese development, in which neither Russia nor the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) participated.

Source. This was reported by The Air Current.

Although the abbreviation of the CR liner was supposed to symbolize the countries participating in the project (C – China, R – Russia), the Chinese partner COMAC decided to refuse the services of the UAC, which was originally supposed to create the airframe and wanted to participate in the creation of engines.

An industry source confirmed to The Air Current that Russia has been excluded from the project, and Beijing has decided to continue it on its own.

Problems with Russian participation in the creation of the aircraft, which made its first flight this year, began in the early years. SOMAC refused to allow Russia to receive revenue from the sale of the aircraft on the Chinese domestic market. Instead, the UAC was offered an increased share in global sales (70%). But it was in China that the demand for the aircraft was expected to be 3,000, while its global prospects were unclear.

In 2022, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of Western sanctions against the Russian aviation industry, China decided to abandon all Russian developments in the CR929 and replace them with Western ones.

Background. We wrote more about this in our article "China and Russia planned to produce a new aircraft together, but Beijing doubted Russian technology".