Zhejiang Yutong New Materials has obtained the official design & production approval certificate for aerospace coatings issued by CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China), making it China’s first domestic enterprise qualified for civil aviation coating production and ending the long-term monopoly held by overseas giants including PPG and AkzoNobel in China’s civil aviation coating market. The milestone marks the commercial launch of home-grown aircraft coating solutions.

Known as the top-tier high-barrier product in coating industry, civil aviation coatings require rigorous R&D and verification. Its two certified products, Aeroep 452 epoxy primer and Aeropu 900 polyurethane topcoat, went through six years of R&D and over ten million R&D investment, passing more than 50 strict performance tests under full supervision of CAAC before getting the market access permit. The finished coating film is merely 20 microns thick, equivalent to an A4 paper, which cuts aircraft dead load while enduring drastic temperature swings of nearly 100℃ during takeoff and landing, solving the longstanding technical conflict between coating hardness and flexibility. During development, R&D teams screened hundreds of raw materials, optimized over a hundred formulas and ran thousands of performance trials. The firm built fully sealed dust-free production workshops with humidity capped below 70% and invested millions of RMB on customized production equipment to meet international aviation manufacturing criteria.

Both coatings comply with material specifications of COMAC, Airbus and Boeing, applicable to mainstream civil aircraft including C909, Boeing and Airbus fleets. Their core technologies have been practically deployed on military helicopters and industrial UAVs, realizing technology transformation from military to civil aviation field. Yutong has reached cooperation with COMAC and plans to apply its certified coatings to C909 maintenance and renovation by the end of 2026.

According to Zeng Chao, general manager of Yutong, a single large civil aircraft requires more than a dozen or dozens of categorized coatings for different fuselage sections. Currently only primer and topcoat products have gained certification; the company will sequentially develop and certify full-spectrum aviation coatings to realize large-scale domestic substitution on home-made jets such as C919 and accelerate the localization of critical aviation chemical raw materials.