Comac ARJ21 / C909

Updated: October 2026 – A slender regional jet with a T-tail, two engines at the rear, small winglets and a registration that starts with B-: then there is a good chance a Comac ARJ21 is in front of you. Since autumn 2024 it has officially been called the C909 and increasingly carries the new name on the fuselage, too. For spotters it is an exciting exotic – an aircraft with a lot of MD-80 heritage that, after years as a purely Chinese product, is now also turning up in Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam. Here you will learn how to recognize the ARJ21, how to tell it from the CRJ900 and Embraer E190, and where you can realistically see it.

What is the Comac ARJ21?

ARJ stands for Advanced Regional Jet. The twinjet is the first jet airliner developed in China itself that was built in series and flies regularly in scheduled service. The program began in 2002 under the ACAC consortium, which was later absorbed into the state-owned group Comac, founded in 2008 in Shanghai. You can read more about the manufacturer on the page about COMAC.

According to Comac, the jet offers 78 to 97 seats depending on layout and a range of about 2,225 to 3,700 kilometers, depending on whether the standard version or the ER version with a higher takeoff weight is flying. That targets the same routes as the CRJ900, Embraer E175 or Embraer E190: short and medium connections between provincial cities and hubs.

The road into scheduled service was long: more than 13 years lay between program launch and first delivery, and between first flight and certification alone more than half a decade. The milestones:

• December 21, 2007: Roll-out of the first prototype
• November 28, 2008: First flight in Shanghai
• December 30, 2014: Type certification by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC)
• November 29, 2015: First delivery to Chengdu Airlines
• June 28, 2016: First scheduled flight from Chengdu to Shanghai-Hongqiao
• July 9, 2017: Production certification by the CAAC
• June 28, 2020: Air China, China Southern and the China Eastern subsidiary OTT Airlines take over their first aircraft simultaneously
• October/November 2024: Renamed the C909, officially presented at the Airshow in Zhuhai

ARJ21 or C909 – which is right?

Both. With the new name C909, Comac slots the regional jet into its product family alongside the Comac C919. Nothing changes on the aircraft itself, and in flight plans and tracking services the ICAO type designator stays AJ27. For you that means: older photos and many databases keep talking about the ARJ21, new liveries and press releases about the C909. The official base versions are still called ARJ21-700 in the STD and ER variants.

Technology: MD-80 heritage meets a new wing

Anyone seeing the ARJ21 for the first time often thinks of a shortened MD-80. That is no coincidence: in the 1980s and 1990s, MD-80s and MD-90s were assembled under license in China, and the fuselage cross-section, nose section and parts of the tail clearly resemble the MD-90. Comac nevertheless stresses that it is an independent design.

New above all is the supercritical wing with winglets, designed by the Ukrainian design bureau Antonov. Power comes from two General Electric CF34-10A – the same engine family that is also in the CRJ and E-Jets. The cabin fittings come from the Austrian supplier FACC. The wide MD cross-section brings a real advantage: instead of four, five seats per row fit in the cabin.

How to recognize the ARJ21

The good news: unlike the C919, which looks easy to confuse with an A320neo, the ARJ21 has a fairly distinctive silhouette. If you know what to look for, you can identify it from a distance.

These details help you confirm the picture:

• Fuselage: For a regional jet the fuselage looks comparatively thick, the nose long and tapering – the MD heritage.
• Wingtips: Upswept winglets with a clear edge; the wing itself is slender and clearly swept.
• Titles: Many aircraft carry ARJ21 or C909 in large letters on the forward fuselage – a gift for identification.

How the country prefixes work and what is behind the B- is explained in the article B- registrations from China. You will find the basics of identifying types at Identifying aircraft types for beginners.

ARJ21, CRJ900 or Embraer E190?

All three serve the same segment of around 90 seats. The table shows the most important differences.

Feature	Comac ARJ21 / C909	Bombardier CRJ900	Embraer E190
ICAO type designator	AJ27	CRJ9	E190
Engine position	at the rear	at the rear	under the wings
Tail	T-tail	T-tail	conventional
Seats per row	5 (2+3)	4 (2+2)	4 (2+2)
Engine	GE CF34-10A	GE CF34-8C	GE CF34-10E
Typical registrations	B- (China), occasionally PK-, RDPL-	worldwide	worldwide

The E190 drops out quickly because its engines hang under the wings. The CRJ900 is trickier: it is also a T-tail jet with rear-mounted engines. Here the narrow, very long CRJ fuselage, the only small wingtips and of course the registrations help. You can read more about the typical features of the class in the guide Identifying regional jets; the shorter sister of the CRJ900 is presented on the page for the CRJ700, and how to tell the E-Jets apart from each other is shown in the article Telling Embraer E-Jets apart.

If you want to dig deeper into the class of rear-engine jets, look at the Fokker 100 and Boeing 717-200. A close relative in spirit is the Russian Sukhoi Superjet 100: also a national regional jet project with Western technology, but with engines under the wings.

Operators and fleets

Launch customer Chengdu Airlines took delivery of the first ARJ21 in 2015 and is still one of the most important operators today. In February 2019, Genghis Khan Airlines from Inner Mongolia joined as the second customer, and Jiangxi Air in 2020. A big step followed on June 28, 2020: the three big state airlines Air China, China Southern and China Eastern – the latter through its subsidiary OTT Airlines – took over their first aircraft simultaneously.

Other Chinese operators include Urumqi Air, China Express, Shandong Airlines and Xiamen Air; converted freighters are added to that. According to available data, around 200 aircraft were in service in early 2026 – so the ARJ21 is no longer an exotic but an everyday sight on many Chinese domestic routes.

Service abroad: Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam

For a long time the ARJ21 remained a purely Chinese aircraft. That changed with TransNusa of Indonesia, the first foreign operator. The airline also used the jet on the Jakarta – Kuala Lumpur route from 2023; that was the first time the type appeared on a scheduled basis at a major airport outside China. TransNusa operates a small C909 fleet of about half a dozen aircraft and has ordered more.

Two more countries followed in 2025: Lao Airlines took delivery of its first aircraft in March 2025 and thus became the second export customer. In April 2025, VietJet began using two ARJ21s leased from Chengdu Airlines, crew included, on domestic routes in Vietnam. In July 2025, Air China opened a scheduled international connection with the type from Hohhot to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia.

Variants

Visually, the passenger versions cannot be told apart:

• ARJ21-700 STD: the base version with about 2,200 km range
• ARJ21-700 ER: higher takeoff weight (43.5 instead of 40.5 t) and about 3,700 km range
• Freighter (C909 CCF): converted passenger jets, certified in early 2023, first deliveries in October 2023
• Special versions: certified are variants as a business jet, air ambulance and for emergency missions; a firefighting version is in development

A stretched version with about 100 seats (ARJ21-900 or C909-900) was designed, but it does not exist in scheduled service.

Where you can see the ARJ21

For spotters from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the same applies as for the C919: The ARJ21 does not fly in European scheduled service. It has only the certification of the Chinese CAAC; there is no certification by EASA or the FAA (as of October 2026). With its limited range it would be unsuitable for long-haul flights to Europe anyway.

Anyone who is already traveling to China for the C919 picks up the ARJ21 almost automatically: in Shanghai and Beijing, both Comac types share the aprons with aircraft of Shanghai Airlines, Sichuan Airlines and many other companies. You will find ideas for spotting destinations beyond Europe in the Bucket list of spotting spots worldwide, and tips for exotic types in the article Spotting rare aircraft. Note: in some countries in Asia, strict rules apply to photography at airports – more on that at Countries that ban photography at airports.

Tracking down the ARJ21

Because the type is so rare outside China, it is best to search for it deliberately. In the common flight tracker services you filter for the type designator AJ27 – that also works for aircraft already painted as C909. That way, before a trip you can see which airlines are currently using the jet on which routes.

How flight tracking works technically is explained in the guide Flight tracking with ADS-B for spotters. Why AJ27 and C27 are two different abbreviations for the same aircraft is covered in IATA and ICAO codes explained. And how to place the prefixes B-, PK- and RDPL- is shown in the overview of Aircraft country codes.

Photo tips for the ARJ21

Once you have it in front of your lens, a few targeted perspectives are worthwhile that make the type unambiguous in the picture.

When the light suits your vantage point, you can calculate it with the guide Planning the sun position for your photo spot.

Conclusion

The ARJ21 – today the C909 – is China’s ticket into airliner construction: technically conservative, with visible MD-80 heritage, CF34 engines at the rear and a modern wing with winglets. After a bumpy start it now flies in large numbers on Chinese domestic routes and has reached its first foreign markets in Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam. For spotters from German-speaking Europe it remains a travel destination – and thanks to its distinctive silhouette, one of the easier exotics to identify.