China's C919 through an AI student's eyes

On July 13, at 10:20 pm, I boarded a flight from Harbin in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province to Beijing, where I would transfer to another flight to Budapest and return home to Europe. The trip marked the end of my first academic year at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).

I expected the Harbin-Beijing flight to be an uneventful first leg of a long journey home. Instead, it became my first experience aboard the C919 — China's domestically developed narrow-body passenger jet — and it gave me a new perspective on the country's technological progress and my own studies in artificial intelligence.

Because we boarded via a jet bridge, I did not get a clear view of the aircraft from the outside. I realized it was a C919 only after entering the cabin and noticing that the interior looked different from those of the aircraft I usually flew on.

This discovery immediately excited me and gave the flight an unexpected sense of significance.

Although the cabin layout was familiar, several details on this Air China aircraft made the experience feel modern. The first was the wireless in-flight entertainment system. After connecting my phone to the onboard network, I could open a portal offering films, television programs and games. It did not provide regular internet access, but it allowed passengers to use their own devices as personal entertainment screens.

Another practical feature was a dedicated phone holder above the tray table. I could place my phone at a comfortable angle, connect my headphones and watch a Chinese action movie without having to hold the device throughout the flight.

I was beginning my journey back to Europe, yet I was still surrounded by the Chinese language, Chinese entertainment and an aircraft that represented one of the country's major engineering achievements.

Silent precision

The flight felt calm and comfortable throughout, but what stayed with me most was the fact that everything worked exactly as it should.

As a passenger, I experienced only a quiet cabin and a smooth flight. Behind that ordinary experience, however, countless electronic, mechanical and software systems had to work together with exceptional precision and reliability.

As a first-year AI major at HIT, I began to think more deeply about those hidden systems. My courses included electronic circuits, computational thinking and practical programming in C, a widely used programming language. Until then, much of what I had learned existed mainly in the form of diagrams, exercises and small programs.

Sitting inside the aircraft connected those subjects to a much larger world of engineering. It made me consider how sensors, electronic components and software systems must cooperate continuously to keep a modern aircraft operating safely.

The area that interests me most is AI-assisted and increasingly autonomous aviation. Such technologies could help pilots interpret sensor data, identify abnormal conditions, optimize routes and make safer decisions.

For me, this area represents an exciting combination of AI, electronics, software and physical engineering.

I had already encountered this combination on a much smaller scale during a two-week robotics program at HIT over the winter vacation. At the end of the program, my group built a small autonomous vehicle that could receive information from sensors, process it and respond through movement.

The vehicle was simple but seeing it act according to our code changed my understanding of robotics. We were no longer only reading about autonomous systems; we had created one ourselves.

Before coming to China, I knew that the country was developing rapidly, but that knowledge was mostly abstract. During my first year here, I began to encounter technology not only as a topic in the news, but also through my studies and daily life.

The robotics program gave me the opportunity to help build a small autonomous system. The C919 flight allowed me to experience a far more complex engineering achievement as an ordinary passenger.

By the time we landed in Beijing, my initial surprise had developed into something more lasting. The flight gave me a clearer sense of why I had chosen to study AI and how much I still had to learn. It also strengthened my confidence in my decision to study in China, where the connections among research, engineering and everyday life are becoming increasingly visible.

Written by Bartosz Turczynski, a Polish undergraduate student majoring in AI at Harbin Institute of Technology. He has studied Chinese for five years and is particularly interested in AI, robotics and China's technological development.