After about 90 minutes in the air the plane landed safely back at Pudong Airport in Shanghai. The plane is a key symbol of Beijing's ambitions to enter the global aviation market.
Made by COMAC, it has been in planning since 2008, but the flight was repeatedly pushed back. For Friday's first flight, the plane carried only five pilots and engineers and took off in front of thousands of aviation workers and enthusiasts.
In an interview carried out in March but released on Chinese television shortly before the launch, test pilot Cai Jun said he had full confidence in the plane. "A pilot knows clearly the condition of a plane. He knows very well whether it will work. So I'm not afraid at all, but focusing more on whether the plane is in its best shape now," he said.
He also described halting an earlier test in late 2016 because of a problem with the brakes. "It's just like driving a car. I put the brakes on, and the plane started to shake," he said. He said he had to argue with the plane's engineers and help improve the design. "For the designers, the plane is their baby, which they believe is perfect. But our task is to tell them that their baby is not perfect, it has strengths and weaknesses, and they have to make improvements," the pilot said.
Orders have already been placed for more than 500 of the planes, with commitments from 23 customers, say officials, mainly Chinese airlines. The main customer is China Eastern Airlines. China has had ambitions to build its own civil aircraft industry since the 1970s. But the Y-10, built in the late 1970s, was impractical due to its heavy weight and only three of the aircraft were ever made.
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