Translated material
China will come, and Russia will return
Competition in the midsize airliner market will double
The European aircraft manufacturer Airbus expects that new models of medium-haul aircraft, which will be introduced to the market in Russia and China in the next 10-15 years, will become dangerous competitors for its own airliners of this class. In order not to help a future rival, the concern intends to limit the transfer to China of technologies that could help in the design of such aircraft, said Airbus CEO Fabrice Bregier. The same applies to Russia, the concern’s press service told Vremya Novostei. Meanwhile, two years ago Airbus was considering the possibility of its participation in the Russian promising MS-21 project.“The French and European aircraft industry must maintain its unique technical achievements in order to maintain its market share in a competitive environment that is set to become tougher with the return of the Russians and the entry of the Chinese into civil aviation,” Mr. Brégier told Le Figaro in September. second person in Airbus management. (President Thomas Enders is considered the highest official of the concern, and the post of CEO comes directly after the presidential one in the Airbus staffing table.) “We know that their aircraft, especially the future large Chinese aircraft C919, will enter the market in 2015-2020 with modern technological content,” added Mr. Bregier.
A day later, he spoke at a conference in Toulouse and, speaking about the transfer of technology to China, emphasized: “This must be done with caution, since China has decided to independently develop an aircraft that will compete with our (European - Ed. ) A320 family." In China, this year the first Airbus assembly plant outside of Europe opened its doors, producing the A320 exclusively for the local market. The Airbus CEO emphasized that it has become the norm for modern aircraft manufacturing when countries and companies cooperate with each other in some areas, while simultaneously competing in others.
In Russia, Airbus maintains an engineering center, which, according to the press service, is “involved in almost all new projects” of the concern. However, Airbus no longer wants to help the Russian MS-21 project in the same class as the A320 and C919. In August 2007, at the Moscow International Air Show, Thomas Enders (at that time the executive director of EADS, which owns Airbus, now the president of Airbus), told Vremya Novostei that negotiations were underway on Airbus’s participation in the development of the MC-21 . Moreover, Mr. Enders specifically emphasized then that in this work it was supposed to use the experience of creating the A320.
“Neither our Russian partners nor we are interested in close cooperation in the highly competitive market segment of narrow-body aircraft,” a representative of the Airbus press service told Vremya Novostei.
The existence of the Chinese C919 project, which makes Mr Bregier “cautious”, was only announced in March this year. On September 8, its prototype was first shown to the public at the Asian Aerospace Expo in Hong Kong. The company Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd (COMAC) promises to produce the first such full-size aircraft in eight years. The aircraft will seat 190 passengers and will be the largest jetliner designed so far in China. (For comparison: the A320 family includes four models with a capacity from 107 to 185 seats, the MS-21 family will consist of three models, from 150 to 210 passengers.)
It was announced that the letter C in the name C919 means: the third largest aircraft manufacturing company in the world has appeared in China (A - Airbus, B - Boeing, C - COMAC). The first “nine” in the model number is a magical favorable number, which in Chinese numerology corresponds to the concept of “forever”. And the last two digits simply mean that the plane has 190 seats.
The Chinese development was immediately taken seriously by Airbus as a competitor in the market. The similar Russian MS-21 project, which has been talked about with varying degrees of certainty for several years, initially seemed more harmless to Europeans. Either due to the lack of magic numbers in its name, or for some other reason. Although the abbreviation MS-21 also stands for quite ambitiously: “Magic aircraft of the 21st century.” In 2007, a Vremya Novostey correspondent directly asked Mr. Enders whether he was afraid of competition between the Russian airliner and the A320. The executive director replied that the MC-21 will most likely appear when the A320 is close to the end of its life cycle, and therefore, if it competes, it will be with some other generation of medium-range aircraft.
The design of the MS-21 within the framework of the Russian United Aircraft Corporation is carried out by the Irkut Corporation and JSC Yakovlev. They promise to bring the product to the market in 2015-2016.
Meanwhile, the Airbus press service explained differently to Vremya Novostei why the concern first showed and then lost interest in participating in the Russian project. “In the past, Airbus and Russian industry have held serious discussions about jointly designing a short-haul wide-body aircraft that would not be a direct competitor to the A320 family,” the press service said. -- In 2007, the size of the MS-21 had not yet been determined. Airbus and Russia discussed this project because there was a possibility of avoiding its competition with the A320."
Indeed, a year later the Russians began to focus on competition with this particular family. It is noteworthy that at the Farnborough International Air Show 2008, the director of the MS-21 program of the Irkut Corporation, Andrei Matveev, speaking about the characteristics of the future aircraft, compared them with its European counterpart (and not the American Boeing-737 of the same class, say). Mr. Matveev assured that in all main parameters the MS-21 will be 12-15% better than the A320.
Airbus itself does not see an urgent need to create a new aircraft to replace the A320. In any case, this is what Fabrice Bregier told Vremya Novostey. "The A320 represents about 50% of the business," he said at the ObjectifNews conference in Toulouse on September 25. “We want to maintain our leadership or our joint (with Boeing. - Ed. ) leadership in the sector from 50 to 200 seats.” “We have to fulfill another 2,500 orders for the A320. That is, there is no need to release a new aircraft right tomorrow. We will improve the current A320 family and improve its technical characteristics in the near and medium term. In parallel, we will work to understand what a “game-changing aircraft” should look like. That is, one that will consume at least 25% less fuel. It's not easy. But we believe that by 2020 we will be able to enter the market with these new technologies.”