Comac will announce its first customers for the C919 narrowbody next year and said it is talking to foreign airlines as well as Chinese ones. Structural work on the aircraft has been allocated among the Chinese factories that were competing for it. “In the first half of next year, the names of the airlines and the number of aircraft will be announced,” said Chen Jin, general manager for sales and marketing. Foreign buyers may not be among the first batch of customers, but “I think the C919 must have foreign users,” he said.

South Korea will focus on developing a Generation-4.5 fighter under a proposed program that previously aimed at an equivalent of the fifth-generation Lockheed Martin F-35. The government is due to decide in November whether to proceed with the program, called KFX, which industrialists hope will meet the air force’s distant F-XX fighter requirement for the 2020s. Lockheed Martin and Boeing are battling for another prize called F-X Phase III, under which the air force proposes to buy 60 fighters next decade.

Japan Airlines’ search for a strategic investor could lead to a shake-up of the global airline alliance system. The carrier says it wants to choose a foreign investor by the end of October. The investor would pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a stake of around 10% in the airline, which has a market capitalization of about $4.8 billion. Japan Airlines’ (JAL) value to an alliance can hardly be overstated. It is the largest carrier in Asia and the biggest in the world’s second-largest economy.