Avic General Aircraft hopes to begin production next year of two business aircraft, one a jet and one piston-engined. Separately, the Chinese company has launched a four-engine amphibious aircraft, evidently an extensive update of the SH-5 flying boat developed and built in small quantities from the 1960s to 1980s. Looking for foreign technology to combine with its own in developing the business aircraft, Avic General Aircraft expects to announce the takeover of at least one foreign company soon.

Comac will announce its first customers for the C919 narrowbody next year and said it is talking to foreign airlines as well as Chinese ones. Structural work on the aircraft has been allocated among the Chinese factories that were competing for it. “In the first half of next year, the names of the airlines and the number of aircraft will be announced,” said Chen Jin, general manager for sales and marketing. Foreign buyers may not be among the first batch of customers, but “I think the C919 must have foreign users,” he said.

South Korea will focus on developing a Generation-4.5 fighter under a proposed program that previously aimed at an equivalent of the fifth-generation Lockheed Martin F-35. The government is due to decide in November whether to proceed with the program, called KFX, which industrialists hope will meet the air force’s distant F-XX fighter requirement for the 2020s. Lockheed Martin and Boeing are battling for another prize called F-X Phase III, under which the air force proposes to buy 60 fighters next decade.