China’s leading aircraft manufacturer hopes to deliver twice the number of its C919 passenger jets this year as it scales up production to meet demand.

The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) has delivered 15 C919s since commercial operations started in May 2023, with the latest being delivered to China Eastern on New Year’s Eve.

“Comac anticipates it will dispatch 30 units of the C919 this year with a production capacity scale of up to 50 units,” the company’s vice-president Shen Bo said on Friday, according to news portal ThePaper.cn.

The state-owned company is facing an extensive backlog, with domestic and international carriers ordering more than a thousand planes, according to Chinese media reports.

Major domestic carriers such as China Eastern, China Southern and Air China each want to have more than a hundred of the planes by 2031.

The firm has previously announced plans to boost its production capacity by expanding its facilities in Shanghai.

Capacity is a major concern for the manufacturer and it was forced to scale back its production plans as it struggled to meet demand.

In March last year it told a suppliers conference it aimed to produce 30 planes in 2024 and 54 this year, rising to 126 by 2028.

China’s home-grown passenger jet C919 celebrates first anniversary of maiden flight.

The C919 received certification from the Civil Aviation Administration in 2022 and gained global attention with its aim of challenging the two market-leading narrowbody planes, the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320.

The plane passed a significant milestone on New Year’s Day when it made its debut on the Shanghai to Hong Kong route, its first scheduled flight outside mainland China.

Comac is also aiming for European certification and hopes the plane will feature on commercial routes to Southeast Asia by the end of next year.

Comac aims to further challenge Boeing and Airbus by developing two long-range widebody jets, the C929 and C939.

It says the C929 will have 280 seats and a range of 12,000km (7,500 miles) “effectively meeting the global demand for international and regional air passenger transport”.

Shen said: “[Comac] has started the initial design for the widebody aircraft C929 and we are undergoing the process of choosing suppliers, with the more detailed design stage coming up next.”

The national carrier Air China is seen as the primary customer for the planes and signed a framework agreement with Comac in November.

The C919 has carried more than one million passengers and entered the stage of scaled development and multi-user operation, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the country’s aviation regulator, said earlier this month.

Beijing hopes domestically developed jets will help the country’s aviation industry to grow, and that producing key components such as engines and avionics will boost innovation.