Vietnam is considering allowing Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) planes to operate in the country, according to a government statement.
Vietnam's Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha met with Comac director Tan Wangeng in Hanoi on Wednesday.
Tran instructed Vietnam's Ministry of Transportation to review existing regulations and propose amendments to remove regulatory barriers in light of the actual situation so that Comac's planes can be operated in Vietnam in the future, the government said in a statement released after the meeting.
At the initial stage, Vietnam's main private carrier, low-cost carrier Vietjet Air, may look into partnering with a Chinese airline that operates Comac planes for testing on certain routes, Tran said.
Comac currently has two products in commercial operation, the C909 (formerly known as ARJ21), a new turbofan regional airliner for short- and medium-range flights, and the C919.
In November last year, Zhang Xiaoguang, marketing director of Comac, revealed that the ARJ21 has been officially put into route operation since June 2016, carrying more than 17 million passengers.
And according to public information, the C919 is China's first jetliner with independent intellectual property rights developed on its own in accordance with internationally recognized airworthiness standards.
Since December 2022, when deliveries officially began, the cumulative deliveries of the C919 have reached more than 10 units. At present, China's three state-owned airlines - China Eastern Airlines, Air China and China Southern Airlines - have all put the C919 into operation on domestic routes.
It is worth noting that almost all of Comac's two models are used on domestic routes. On April 18, 2023, the C909 aircraft went into commercial operation overseas for the first time, with Indonesia's TransNusa flying the Jakarta-Bali route.
Comac has been eyeing Vietnam as a potential market, having test-flown C919 and ARJ21 aircraft to the country during a two-week marketing tour of Southeast Asia in the first half of last year.
Despite attempting to benchmark against Airbus and Boeing, neither Comac's C909 nor the larger C919 have been certified by the European Union or the U.S. for their metrics, which industry insiders say has hampered the company's efforts to sell or lease aircraft to foreign carriers.
