The core dispute: COMAC C919 certification

The root cause of the hold-up is a deepening disagreement over bringing the C919 to global markets. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has made clear that the aircraft’s path to European validation will be long and demanding.

EASA Executive Director Florian Guillermet stated in May 2025 that the C919 “cannot be certified in 2025” and projected a three- to six-year timeline . By August 2025, European regulators had informally signaled that formal certification was unlikely before 2028 and could slip as far as 2031 . The main sticking point is avionics: EASA is planning 4,200 hours of testing, well above the roughly 3,000 hours typical for Airbus or Boeing narrowbodies, due to the complexity of systems that blend Chinese and Western components .

For COMAC, which had publicly aimed for certification in 2025, the drawn-out process is a major barrier to challenging the Airbus-Boeing duopoly outside Chinese and a few Southeast Asian markets . China is now using its regulatory control over one of the world’s largest aviation markets—Airbus has been pursuing a potential 500-jet order from Chinese carriers, which remains stalled—as a bargaining chip to accelerate that timeline .

Part of a broader trade confrontation

The aircraft certification fight is unfolding inside a much larger EU-China trade tension. The EU’s goods-trade deficit with China reached €359.9 billion in 2025, up 2.7% year-on-year . That figure underpins a series of aggressive policy moves by Brussels:

• The European Commission has imposed anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and is considering new tariffs on other strategic sectors .
• The EU’s Industrial Acceleration Act (IAA), released in March 2026, pushes to cap single-supplier sourcing of critical materials at 30–40%, a measure squarely aimed at reducing dependence on China .
• The Commission has also launched foreign subsidies investigations into Chinese companies operating in Europe .

Beijing has responded with its own escalations. It has invoked anti-extraterritorial jurisdiction regulations for the first time to block Chinese firms from complying with EU investigations, and it has imposed export controls on rare earths, a critical input for European technology supply chains .

Yet the relationship is not a clean break. Bilateral trade actually rose about 5% in 2025, even as structural decoupling accelerates on multiple fronts . Diplomatic channels remain open, but the Airbus delivery slow-walk signals that China is willing to use specific, reversible economic tools to gain leverage in a standoff where it feels its own industrial ambitions are being contained .

The standoff over plane deliveries, therefore, is best understood as a carefully calibrated piece of a larger strategic contest—one where aircraft in a regulatory queue are just as much a trade weapon as a tariff.

The core dispute: COMAC C919 certification

The root cause of the hold-up is a deepening disagreement over bringing the C919 to global markets. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has made clear that the aircraft’s path to European validation will be long and demanding.

EASA Executive Director Florian Guillermet stated in May 2025 that the C919 “cannot be certified in 2025” and projected a three- to six-year timeline . By August 2025, European regulators had informally signaled that formal certification was unlikely before 2028 and could slip as far as 2031 . The main sticking point is avionics: EASA is planning 4,200 hours of testing, well above the roughly 3,000 hours typical for Airbus or Boeing narrowbodies, due to the complexity of systems that blend Chinese and Western components .

For COMAC, which had publicly aimed for certification in 2025, the drawn-out process is a major barrier to challenging the Airbus-Boeing duopoly outside Chinese and a few Southeast Asian markets . China is now using its regulatory control over one of the world’s largest aviation markets—Airbus has been pursuing a potential 500-jet order from Chinese carriers, which remains stalled—as a bargaining chip to accelerate that timeline .

Part of a broader trade confrontation

The aircraft certification fight is unfolding inside a much larger EU-China trade tension. The EU’s goods-trade deficit with China reached €359.9 billion in 2025, up 2.7% year-on-year . That figure underpins a series of aggressive policy moves by Brussels:

• The European Commission has imposed anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and is considering new tariffs on other strategic sectors .
• The EU’s Industrial Acceleration Act (IAA), released in March 2026, pushes to cap single-supplier sourcing of critical materials at 30–40%, a measure squarely aimed at reducing dependence on China .
• The Commission has also launched foreign subsidies investigations into Chinese companies operating in Europe .

Beijing has responded with its own escalations. It has invoked anti-extraterritorial jurisdiction regulations for the first time to block Chinese firms from complying with EU investigations, and it has imposed export controls on rare earths, a critical input for European technology supply chains .

Yet the relationship is not a clean break. Bilateral trade actually rose about 5% in 2025, even as structural decoupling accelerates on multiple fronts . Diplomatic channels remain open, but the Airbus delivery slow-walk signals that China is willing to use specific, reversible economic tools to gain leverage in a standoff where it feels its own industrial ambitions are being contained .

The standoff over plane deliveries, therefore, is best understood as a carefully calibrated piece of a larger strategic contest—one where aircraft in a regulatory queue are just as much a trade weapon as a tariff.