• The Chinese company COMAC renames its regional aircraft C909, keeping the naming style of its new C919.
• This may not allow COMAC to sell more C909s, but it is marketing the plane under a unified family name.
• All this is part of COMAC’s desire to establish itself on the international market with Boeing and Airbus.

Chinese aircraft manufacturer COMAC on Tuesday renamed its regional aircraft to adopt a unified naming style for all its planes, contributing to its ambition to eventually gain a share of the international market.

The up-and-coming manufacturer turned heads last year when it launched its first local airliner, the medium range C919intended to compete with the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.

Today, state-owned COMAC said its smaller The ARJ21 will be nicknamed C909in accordance with the C919 nomenclature.

The C909 is older than its larger cousin, with development beginning in 2002 and its first commercial flight taking off in June 2016. Its former name, ARJ21, stood for Advanced Regional Jet for the 21st Century.

As a regional aircraft, it is technically suitable for flights lasting up to four or five hours – think trips like New York to Miami.

However, the Boeing and Airbus duopoly should not have much to fear from the Chinese plane. Offering approximately 70 to 90 seats, the C909 is often compared to the Boeing 717, which was marketed to airlines in the 1990s.

How the C909 fits into COMAC’s plans

But its name change speaks to COMAC’s intention to internationalize as a whole, David Yu, a finance professor at New York University in Shanghai, told Business Insider.

“If you look at market standards, no other player has really done this in terms of rebranding their aircraft. Unless it’s an M&A deal,” Yu said , who also runs the consultancy firm Asia Aviation Valuation Advisors.

COMAC is expected to soon launch another aircraft with a similar name, the C929, a larger aircraft that can accommodate 290 passengers. The Chinese firm is also working on an even larger aircraft, the C939a large aircraft with 390 seats.

Yu said the name change to C909 allows the Chinese aircraft maker to market a full range of aircraft variants under one name – much like Airbus and Boeing sell their planes.

Boeing, for example, offers a range of seat capacities from 138 to 204 passengers with the 737 Max 7, 8, 9 and 10.

This doesn’t change the technical capabilities of the aircraft, but it streamlines the company’s offerings into a single family.

“If you think about it from a global perspective, they want the smallest and largest aircraft, and every segment in between, to be competitive,” Yu said of COMAC.

New name doesn’t mean more sales for the C909

In its announcement at the Zhuhai Air Show on Tuesday, COMAC said the C909 would be lighter, stronger and quieter than the ARJ21.

That said, Brendan Sobie, a Singapore-based aviation consultant, said the new name might not help COMAC sell the C909 internationally.

On the one hand, the aircraft’s aging technology puts it at a disadvantage, he told BI.

“Every time you have a new airplane, it goes back to when the airplane was originally developed. With that, everything was selected 20 years ago,” Sobie said.

Just over 100 Chinese planes were sold to Chinese airlines and TransNusa Airlines, an Indonesian carrier.

More attention has instead been focused on the narrow-body C919, Sobie added.

The launch of the new plane comes as Airbus and Boeing both suffer from delivery delays which frustrated their airline customers. Over the past year, Boeing has also faced a reckoning the safety of its 737s after a door stopper exploded from one of his planes in mid-flight.

“There is some sort of appetite for another player in the market, but COMAC has a lot of challenges to overcome,” Sobie said.

For example, neither the C919 nor the C909 is certified by US or European aviation authorities, although COMAC has been certified lobby for approval of C919.

“You have yet to see a large, independently run flagship airline commit to these aircraft because they have to be certified,” Sobie said.

Where the manufacturer and its C909 could pose a greater threat to Boeing and Airbus is in China. Domestic airlines operate more than 4,300 Boeing planes and 1,700 Airbus planes there, and China has already approved COMAC planes for commercial use.

Chinese media welcomed the C909 name change on Tuesday, reporting that local airlines had ordered 70 renamed planes.

Yu said that if COMAC could make the C919 and C909 economically attractive to airlines, it would have a chance to capture market share both domestically and abroad.

“I think ultimately the question is whether the airline can make money on this. That’s the bottom line,” he said.

An Airbus spokesperson told BI that COMAC’s developments “would not prevent us from being present in markets where we have significant customer demand”, including China.

“We have always indicated that we see competition coming from COMAC, and this is now a reality, starting with the Chinese market,” he said.

Boeing did not respond to an after-hours request for comment from Business Insider.