COMAC ARJ21 ARJ21-700 STD (C909 STD)

The ARJ21-700 was a flagship project of China's 10th Five-Year Plan. Work was formally launched in March 2002 under the state-owned ACAC consortium, which split the airframe between Chengdu (nose), Xi'an (wings and fuselage), Shenyang (empennage) and Shanghai (final assembly). The original plan called for a first flight in 2005 and airline service eighteen months later; instead, trial production only began in June 2006 and the programme slipped by eight years. Airframe 101 was rolled out on 21 December 2007 and flew for the first time on 28 November 2008 from Dachang airfield in Shanghai.

Certification leaned on a fleet of test airframes that joined the campaign through 2009 and 2010. On 15 July 2009 the aircraft flew the 1,300 km from Shanghai to Xi'an in two hours and nineteen minutes, and by August 2011 static, flutter and crosswind testing was behind it. AC104 crossed the Pacific for natural-icing trials — the first time a Chinese-developed regional jet had gone abroad in search of certification weather — and came home on 28 April 2014, having logged 711 flights and more than 1,442 hours by that November. AC105 then flew 83 route-proving sectors between ten airports and returned to Yanliang on 16 December 2014 after the final function-and-reliability flight. Two weeks later, on 30 December 2014, the CAAC issued the Chapter 25 type certificate, closing a campaign that had demanded 5,000 flight hours.

The -700 STD is a T-tailed twinjet with two rear-mounted General Electric CF34-10A engines of 17,057 lbf each and a Collins Pro Line 21 flight deck with FMS-4200 flight management. It measures 33.46 m long, 27.28 m in span and 8.44 m high, on a supercritical wing swept 25 degrees and fitted with winglets, designed by Antonov. The double-bubble fuselage, 3.14 m wide inside, is what leads many Western observers to trace the design back to the MD-80 and MD-90 built under licence in Shanghai — a lineage Comac rejects, claiming a wholly indigenous aircraft. The cabin takes 90 seats in one class or 78 in two; operating empty weight is 24,955 kg against a 40,500 kg maximum take-off weight, with 1,200 nautical miles (about 2,220 km) of fully loaded range, an 11,900 m ceiling and a 1,700 m take-off run.

The first production aircraft flew on 18 June 2014 and Comac handed the first -700 to Chengdu Airlines on 29 November 2015. Revenue service opened on 28 June 2016 with a Chengdu-Shanghai sector flown a day after the CAAC approved commercial operations; through that summer season the type worked three weekly rotations to Shanghai Hongqiao. Series production was certified in July 2017, and on 6 March 2020 the first aircraft from the second assembly line at Pudong — rated at thirty aircraft a year and shared with the C919 — made its production test flight. At the Zhuhai air show in November 2024 Comac renamed the whole family C909, bringing it into line with the C919 and C929; the baseline became the C909 STD with no change to the aircraft itself.