(Yicai Global) Dec. 15 -- Following successful test flights of its home-grown large passenger planes, China now is working on developing domestically-built engines for those aircrafts.

A research project on CJ1000A engine developed to power the narrow-body twin-engine jet airliner Comac C919 passed the conceptual design review jointly conducted by the ministry of industry and information technology, the civil aviation administration of China and the state administration of science, technology and industry for national defense on Dec. 10, the ministry said online yesterday.

The engine project consists of five stages, namely, demand analysis and definition, conceptual design, preliminary design, detailed design & trial production and validations. That the project has passed the conceptual design review means China has progressed from the technical validation stage to the engineering and construction stage in developing power equipment for its home-made large passenger aircraft, the ministry emphasized.

The CJ1000A engine for passenger jets is designed to have overall performance comparable to that of the state-of-the-art LEAP engine and will become China's first engine for C919 that has Chinese-owned intellectual property and is developed in strict accordance with civil aviation airworthiness requirements, the ministry added.

China's first domestic-made large passenger aircraft C919 successfully completed its first test flight earlier this year. It uses the latest generation of Leap engine co-developed by US-based General Electric Co. [NYSE:GE] and France's Safran SA [EPA:SAF].