I’m so jaded by what china does. Likely the whole point of bringing in boeing and airbus is just to steal their technology and reproduce a Chinese jet from boeing and airbus designs that will supplant them first in china and then worldwide.
So, do these planes fly, or are they teardowns?
THIS!
Exactly, but the thing is that both Boeing and Airbus know this. They know China will take the technology, make poor reproductions of it, and then eventually make better/as good versions of it. Basically what Japan did with the automobile industry - just at a larger scale. Their dilemma though is they believe they cannot abandon the immediate market opportunity, and thus they will play along until they eventually get hoisted by their own petard
Probably, but China doesn’t have any pilots. There’s a pilot shortage all over the world. Old guard is retiring or getting forced out due to age restrictions. Lots of the military guys, due to the operational tempo of the GWOT, don’t want to fly anymore. They get a decent pension from the military and then a desk job in middle or upper level management, weekends off, holidays off and they’re not responsible for a few hundred people.
There’s a flight school outside of Atlanta that has a contract with the Chinese government to get Chinese students up to speed from Zero to Hero, on flying commercial aircraft. Went there to ask about taking classes and there had to be a few hundred of them, running around. They’re not allowed to speak Chinese, at all, during the school day. Flight school rep says they just rotate them thru. School is making bank.