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Boeing vs China?

China says its home-grown large aircraft are a new driving force for China’s manufacturing sector

Nose part of China’s AG600 amphibious aircraft

CHINA DAILY MAIL Chinese government’s primetime TV news CCTV  yesterday gave first place to its report on China’s three new large aircraft.

It said that China’s efforts in developing large aircraft have reached the harvesting stage.

General assembly of China’s AG600, the world’s largest amphibious aircraft, began yesterday and construction of China’s C919 airliner will begin soon.

China’s large military transport aircraft, the Y-20, has undergone various difficult test flights under very demanding weather and geographical conditions for two years and is expected to be delivered soon.

With a takeoff load of 50 tons, the AG600 is larger than the amphibious aircraft of Russia and Japan, the only two countries in the world that produce such aircraft.

It is a powerful vehicle for fighting forest fires and marine rescue. It can take 12 tons of water in 12 seconds and let down all the water on a fire in 4 seconds.

For marine rescue, it can land on the water near the area of an accident to send lifeboats to take 50 victims onto it.

As it cruises at a speed of 480 km/hour and has a range of 5,000 km, it is able to conduct rescue mission at James Shoal, China’s remotest reef in the South China Sea, within 5 hours.

The large amphibious aircraft is developed primarily for rescuing Chinese naval crews in case of war.

The report stresses the tremendous driving force of the large aircraft industry for China’s economy, as the innovation and creation in the aviation industry will bring along 16 times of the innovation and creation in other industries. That will give rise to an industry of the scale of US$16 billion.

The report continues that the world should not fail to notice China’s tremendous efforts in developing three types of large aircraft at the same time.

The unnamed person in charge of developing large aircraft said that China is capable of developing a new type of large aircraft in 8 to 10 years, just like developed Western countries.

At the end the report, Chinese President Xi Jinping is quoted as saying, “We must have our own large aircraft.”

Source: CCTV –  “China-made large aircrafts, new driving force for China’s manufacturing industries” (summary by Chan Kai Yee based on the report in Chinese)

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