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The MS-21, a new single aisle airliner produced by Russia's United Aircraft Corporation, is the first passenger plane borne aloft by lightweight carbon-composite wings built without a costly pressurized oven called an autoclave.
[...] Under the new technology, instead of using fiber that is pre-impregnated with resin, parts are made from a dry-fiber engineered textile which is placed in a mould and then infused with resin under a vacuum.
The parts can then be cured in an oven without pressure, a process estimated to cost 25 percent more than metal. Ultimately, that gap needs to narrow significantly or disappear.
Boatbuilders and windfarm makers have used this method for years. Secondary airplane parts have also been made that way.
But although Canada's Bombardier partly used the technique for its CSeries, it was rare for flight-critical parts before the designers of the new Russian plane chose it for the wing.
previous stories:
Irkut Shows New MC-21 Airliner
The Little Gear That Could Reshape the Jet Engine
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday May 31 2017, @04:59PM
The article has a bubble map with the range, seats, and number of orders for new narrow body planes. What is interesting is that it includes Bombadier and Embradier on the same chart as Airbus and Boeing. You can see the regional jet manufacturers still don't compete for number of seats per plane, but to consider them competitors starts to erode the duopoly that Airbus and Boeing have on medium range jets.
It will be interesting to see how the C919 and MS-21 compete. The existing players (Airbus and Boeing) already have a lot of experience and yet they still have been in court with each other over unfair government subsidies. That is not a market I would want to enter, but I suspect that the Chinese and Russian governments will be helping their respective manufacturers also.