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More evidence of China’s progress toward developing a homegrown regional turboprop has emerged, adding fuel to the speculative fire that Xian Aircraft Company has successfully flown its MA700 turboprop with engines that weren’t provided directly by Pratt & Whitney Canada.
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A photo posted April 2 (and deleted days later) on Chinese social media is of the forward fuselage of an airborne MA700. The wings and engine of the 80-seat regional turboprop were deliberately cropped out of the photo, whose location and date were not discernible.
All of these clues come as China watches its neighbor Russia cut off from western aerospace hardware following its invasion of Ukraine.
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