VietJet has terminated the lease of two COMAC C909 regional jets after a brief six-month trial operated in partnership with Chengdu Airlines. The low-cost carrier cited high operating costs, difficulties in crew training and hiring, and maintenance as well as legal and regulatory constraints, as key reasons for ending the arrangement.
The lease was signed with considerable fanfare immediately following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Vietnam in April positioned at the time as a symbolic breakthrough for Chinese civil aircraft manufacturing in Southeast Asia. Six months later, it has ended with little public notice.
Meanwhile, VietJet has taken delivery of its first Boeing 737-800 as part of a much larger, long-term $32 billion commitment to Boeing aircraft.
This is the first documented commercial setback for COMAC in ASEAN and this is the real story that has gone not known mostly. COMAC’s export ambitions in Southeast Asia have encountered their first clear commercial retreat in a competitive market. The C909 (a modernised regional jet) was meant to demonstrate that Chinese aircraft could compete on cost and reliability with established Western types. Instead, the trial highlighted practical challenges that many observers had quietly anticipated from supply chain and support ecosystem limitations to the difficulty of integrating new aircraft types into an existing low-cost carrier operation optimised for Boeing and Airbus fleets.
VietJet’s decision is particularly telling because the airline is one of the most aggressive and commercially minded LCCs in the region. If even VietJet which has shown willingness to experiment found the economics and operational hurdles unworkable in a short trial, it sets a cautionary precedent for other ASEAN carriers considering COMAC products.
What this means for COMAC's ASEAN push is that COMAC has made significant progress with the C919 narrowbody in China but breaking into export markets against the deeply entrenched Boeing-Airbus duopoly and their global support networks is proving far more difficult. The VietJet episode suggests that political goodwill and state-to-state diplomacy can open the door, but commercial viability, total cost of ownership, and operational integration ultimately decide whether that door stays open.
For Boeing and Airbus, this is a reminder that their dominance in the region is not easily displaced. For other Southeast Asian carriers watching from the sidelines (in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and beyond), VietJet’s experience provides valuable real-world data on the risks of early adoption of new Chinese aircraft types.
The retreat does not kill COMAC’s long-term ambitions Beijing will continue to invest heavily in the ecosystem. But it does illustrate that the path to meaningful market share in competitive ASEAN skies will be longer and harder than initial political narratives suggested.
VietJet has chosen to double down on its Boeing relationship. The message to the market is clear that in aviation, performance and economics still trump geopolitics.