Recently, the first "China built" commercial jet had its debut. For Chinese commercial aviation this was a big day - not so much for of the commentators.

Some of the articles I read could not resist to criticize the project in one way or another. One article compared the ARJ 21 with state of the art Boeing, Airbus, and Embraer models. And while I certainly support objective comments that bring events in perspective, I feel that there is some underlying issues with the criticism in this case that hold lessons for other situations.

Firstly, aim to compare apples to apples.

No company can be expected to build a jet to standards set by market players with decades of experience in a field that has seen dramatic developments over the past 20 years. Since the Wright Brothers had their first successful flight in 1903, many things have changed. From that perspective, building a 100 seat commercial plane that meets at least basic safety standards (the Chinese standards are presumably lower than the FAA and the plane is not FAA certified), can be called a success. Of course, one could ask then why to enter the market in the first place, if one can't compete with the leading players.

That leads to the second point: Understand the environment.

To judge China's decision to build their own commercial plane one needs to understand the economic and political environment in China. In this case, the project is half prestige, half technological development. The prestige part is easy to explain: every big economy has (or had) their own aircraft manufacturer. Just as every country still feels the need to have their airline. The more important piece though is the technological development. The manufacturing sector is still the most important one for the Chinese economy (beside agriculture to feed 1.2bn people). The aircraft industry is one where many state-of-the-art players (e.g. Boeing) are already producing in China. Copying the know-how gained from working with those players and applying the technology to a domestically produced jet will ensure knowledge transfer.

In that respect, the ARJ21 was never intended to compete with any of the other commercial jets. The political system will ensure itself that the jet is being used on domestic routes - nothing more is needed. Lastly, without researching the facts, I would argue that no other country with USD 6,800 GDP per capita has managed to build their own commercial jet yet…