As Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned of future Chinese domination of the airliner business, President Donald Trump began throttling aircraft parts shipments to China as leverage in trade talks over rare earth minerals. Duffy said Wednesday the certification process for airliners needs to be speeded up with less redundancy to encourage airliner manufacturers to design new aircraft. “Where’s the new innovation in aviation from the big producers?” Duffy said in comments made in Washington. “It doesn’t happen because it’s so hard to certify. We need to make sure we have safe aviation, but can we move faster?”
Among the initiatives being considered is writing commonly used exemptions on a variety of mundane aircraft features into the regs so the already-widely-accepted items don’t have to be retested in every aircraft type they appear in. The repetitive testing and paperwork take an enormous amount of time with no clear safety benefit. Boeing is feeling the heat from China’s COMAC C919, the country’s answer to the Boeing 737 and Airbus’ A320 series, although the C919 is not certified outside of China and not even half Chinese.
The Chinese aircraft uses many parts and systems made in other countries, including the U.S., and they’ve become leverage in trade negotiations with China. In its latest move, the U.S. is slowing the shipments of key parts to ensure COMAC doesn’t start stockpiling them to ensure steady production of the aircraft. The move is a bargaining gambit over U.S. access to rare earth minerals, which are a key element of the negotiations. More than half the parts in a C919 come from the U.S., including the CFM LEAP-1C engines (a partnership between GE and France’s Safran), APUs, flight controls and landing gear parts from Honeywell, and avionics from Collins.
