China’s electric airliner flew itself 19 times before COMAC let pilots aboard

China’s first battery-electric airliner has flown with people on board. COMAC’s CE-25A, a 19-seat commuter plane pushed by ten electric ducted fans set into its wings, took off from Binzhou in Shandong province with two pilots and a flight test engineer inside, and the state planemaker says every system behaved as expected.

The order of events is the unusual part. Before anyone climbed in, the aircraft had already flown itself 19 times with nobody aboard, which flips the usual sequence where test pilots take a new prototype up first. For anyone who flies short regional hops, it is the clearest sign so far that a full-size passenger plane with no jet fuel and no propellers is leaving the concept stage.

The crewed sortie itself was short. The whole test lasted 57 minutes and 46 seconds, of which 16 minutes and 38 seconds were spent in the air, covering 60.4 km, according to China Civil Aviation News. COMAC lists a maximum takeoff weight of 10 tonnes, a cruise speed of 300 km/h at 2,400 metres and a range of 400 km (about 250 miles). On paper, that covers London to Paris with distance to spare.

The name carries a promise. The “25” refers to CCAR-25, the Chinese airworthiness rules for transport-category aircraft, the same safety code that governs large passenger jets rather than the lighter rules for small planes. COMAC developed the aircraft with battery maker CATL and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Neither company has said which cells power it, though CATL has claimed up to 500 Wh/kg for its “condensed” battery, the density long treated as the threshold for commercial electric flight.

The gap between the brochure and an airline timetable is still wide. That 400 km figure shrinks once the reserves regulators require are set aside, and a conventional Beechcraft 1900 turboprop in the same seat class flies well over 1,000 km, as Electrek pointed out. The cruise speed is also slower than the 400 km/h shown on a placard beside a CE-25A model at a Shanghai trade fair. COMAC has named no airline customer, no price and no date for passenger service.

For now this is a Chinese program. The type certificate under review would cover China, and COMAC has not said whether it will seek approval from Europe’s EASA or the US Federal Aviation Administration. Its closest Western rival, Heart Aerospace, flew its X1 demonstrator for 27 minutes in Plattsburgh, New York, in August, but dropped its own 19-seat design for a 30-seat ES-30 that carries backup turbogenerators and targets 2031. Eviation’s nine-seat Alice flew in 2022, and the company laid off most of its staff in early 2025.

The timeline shows how quickly the program surfaced. The CE-25A made its first uncrewed autonomous flight on February 2 this year. The full-size aircraft, registered B-0EFH, only became public when photos leaked on Chinese social media on October 28, and the first crewed flight followed on November 14. The Civil Aviation Administration of China has accepted COMAC’s type certificate application, and the plane must still finish the required test flights and airworthiness review before it can fly paying passengers on commercial routes.

Until then, the number to watch is the smallest one in the release: just over 16 minutes in the air with three people aboard a plane designed to carry 19 passengers.

Tags: China, aviation, CATL, CE-25A, COMAC, electric aircraft