A red and black aircraft with ten ducted fans lined along its wings left the ground in eastern China last weekend for the first time with a crew inside. On November 14, 2026, the COMAC CE-25A took off from Binzhou in Shandong province carrying two pilots and a flight test engineer. The plane stayed airborne for 16 minutes and 38 seconds, covered 60.4 kilometers, and returned safely. Ground operations brought the full test session to 57 minutes and 46 seconds. COMAC reported that every system worked as expected.
So, while it appeared to be the aircraft’s first flight, it wasn’t. Back in February, there was an unmanned flight, and COMAC had already completed 19 autonomous verification trips to check that everything was working properly before adding people. And then there were the full-size photos, as the red and black demonstrator with the registration B-0EFH made the rounds on Chinese social media in late October, but that was only after a scale model of it was shown at an exhibition in Shanghai in 2023, more than a year ago.
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COMAC designed the CE-25A as a small plane for short city routes. It can accommodate 19 people plus a few crew members and has a maximum takeoff weight of 10 metric tons (or approximately 22,000 pounds). On paper, it can travel at 300km/h at a height of 2,400m and has a range of 400 km. Some previous reports stated it could reach 400km/h and travel up to 500km, but the statistics the business is now sticking to are on the low end of that.
Ten electric fans provide power, five on each wing, side by side, in a distributed configuration. They sit in nacelles that are virtually invisible in the wing construction, with no hanging pylons like the other planes. This configuration makes it such that if one of the fans fails, it won’t knock the whole plane off, and it preserves the outer wings open for control surfaces. At the back of the plane, a conventional T-tail sticks up. The name isn’t too difficult to break down: C for China/COMAC, E for electric, 25 for the transport-category airworthiness norms it follows, and A for the first in the series.
CATL (the battery people) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have teamed up with COMAC to form a joint venture in 2023 with a registered capital of 600 million yuan, focusing on electric aircraft. Guess what? CATL even demonstrated cells capable of cramming 500 watt-hours per kilogram (at the cell level) in 2023, claiming that those cells would be ready for aviation standards soon, but COMAC hasn’t revealed which battery pack is actually powering the CE-25A, so we don’t know the exact energy density or pack size.
China’s aviation regulator has already cleared the airworthiness application, putting the program into formal assessment, which is required before it can begin flying paying passengers. COMAC hasn’t indicated when that will happen or when it will begin flying, but the concept is that this plane will be good for all those short journeys under 400 kilometers (the distance at which existing batteries can still do the job). Other manufacturers have also been working on all-electric prototypes, but have frequently ended up switching over to hybrid systems for longer trips once performance and real-world problems are considered in.
