By Lisa Barrington
SEOUL (Reuters) -Brunei has become the latest country to allow its airlines to operate Chinese-made aircraft, according to new rules published on Thursday by Brunei’s aviation regulator, in a boost for Shanghai-based planemaker COMAC.
Brunei is a small market, but each advance for China-made aircraft abroad is closely watched as Beijing looks for international acceptance at a time when the aerospace industry is struggling to meet demand for new planes and has been drawn into the global trade war.
State-owned COMAC has ambitions to compete alongside dominant planemakers Airbus, Boeing and Embraer, but its two plane models – the C909 and C919 – lack key certifications from Western regulators and the company has not secured an order from a major global airline outside China.
BEIJING LEVERAGING ALLIANCES TO PROMOTE ITS JETS
To show the world its planes are in active use, Beijing has leveraged its relationships with regional allies like Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia to place C909 regional jets with airlines there.
The push to permit airlines in Brunei to operate China-made planes has been led by GallopAir, a Brunei-focused start-up airline, which has C909s on order and which is backed by Chinese investment.
In 2023, it ordered 15 C909s and 15 of COMAC’s larger and newer C919 narrow-body model, the first C919 order by a non-Chinese airline.
Previously, Brunei’s Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) would only approve planes that had design certification from U.S., Canadian, European or Brazilian regulators, which included aircraft made by Boeing, Airbus and Embraer.
CHINA-CERTIFIED PLANES PERMITTED
The aviation body’s amendment, published on Thursday, added the Civil Aviation Authority of China (CAAC), a regulator, to its list. The designs of COMAC planes are certified by the CAAC.
In April, Vietnam added CAAC to its list of approved aviation regulators, documents from the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam showed.
Last week, however, Vietnamese low-cost carrier Vietjet stopped operating its two leased C909 aircraft after a six-month lease contract for the planes expired, Reuters reported on Monday from sources.
COMAC has not delivered any planes to GallopAir and it is not clear when the first delivery would take place, its CEO Cham Chi told Reuters.
The C909, which has up to 90 seats, was China’s first jet-engine-powered plane to reach commercial production and it entered service in 2016.
COMAC later launched the larger C919, which is intended to compete against the popular Airbus A320neo and Boeing 737 MAX narrow-body models. The C919 is currently only used by Chinese airlines.
This year, COMAC has fallen behind on previously stated delivery targets for its narrow-body C919, according to regulatory filings from the three airlines that fly the model.
(Reporting by Lisa Barrington in Seoul; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus and Tomasz Janowski)
