On May 5, the home-made large aircraft C919 successfully completed its maiden flight in Shanghai Pudong Airport, marking that, undergoing nearly 10 years of hardships, the Chinese dream of “l(fā)arge aircraft” came true officially. As the only domestic Tier 1 supplier for independent provision of complete system to C919 project, AVIC SAE, under the presence of Pu Yi, the Chairman and Party Secretary, etc., witnessed this historic moment.
It is reported that 22 products with 20 part numbers, including control panel assemblies & dimmer control system (CPAs&DCS) and integrated circuit breaker panel (ICBP), carried by the Aircraft 101 completing the maiden flight are independently developed and produced by AIVC SAE. Compared with other aircraft systems, the systems undertaken by SAE for development entail a wider and more complex cross-linking relation with other systems. Among them, as the man-machine interaction interface between the flight crew and the aircraft systems, CPAs&DCS provides the flight crew with a platform to operate and control the aircraft systems, integral illumination for cockpit, and system status display. ICBP powers up nearly 40 important electrical loads for the aircraft and provides electrical protection, and, in the meantime, monitors status of the aircraft circuit breaker and equipment failure. The CPAs&DCS and ICBP provided by AVIC SAE employ distributed dimming control based on CAN bus, highly-reliable dual-channel digital signal transmission, excellent control system and superior visual protection to create an eye-pleasing environment for the C919 cockpit.
As the first domestic product supplier of independent R&D for complete system to C919 project and granted with the airworthiness tag by Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), since 2013 when it undertook the development task alone, relying on the development for C919 project, taking advantage of the first-mover advantage of the military aircraft development system in aviation products, AVIC SAE has broken the disadvantage that the development standard for military aircraft was independent of that for civil aircraft to make the civil aircraft development system approach the internationally accepted norms, cultivated an international R&D team, and explored a civil aircraft development pattern of “civil-military integration and independent innovation” in the field of complex on-board systems for civil aircraft; AVIC SAE has achieved a number of milestone victories, providing a solid guarantee for the first flight of C919 large aircraft. For C919 project, it is the first time that AVIC SAE has carried out the development fully in accordance with the international civil aircraft development process; the successful maiden flight of the home-made large aircraft C919 indicates that SAE is capable of strictly following the airworthiness standards to provide civil aircraft systems and has dominated the leading position at home; in the meantime, it marks that AVIC SAE has transformed the development process for on-board equipment of civil aircraft from theory into practice, breaking the predicament that the avionics field of civil aircraft has been monopolized by foreign companies for a long time and taking an important step forward on the road to “get integrated into the world aviation industry chain”, which is of a groundbreaking significance in the development history of AVIC SAE.
As a home-made large passenger aircraft independently designed and developed by China, C919 is a medium and short-range single-channel narrow-body passenger aircraft with more than 150 seats; in the future, it will compete with Airbus 320 series, Boeing 737 series, and other world-famous commercial aircrafts so that the home-made large aircraft project has an immeasurable development prospect. AVIC SAE will take it as an opportunity to focus on the domestic market while keep an eye on the global one to rival the international system-level suppliers on the same arena, thus setting sail to the vast sea of civil aircraft.
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