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China to decide on entry to Interstate Aviation Committee in late April — Russian official

MOSCOW, April 7. /TASS/. China in late April is to make the final decision whether to join the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) or not, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Rogozin told TASS in an interview on Tuesday.

Accepting the proposal that Russia made in late 2014 would simplify certification of the jointly designed equipment.

"China has a big interest [in joining IAC]," Rogozin said. "I think that I’ll have a meeting in Hangzhou in late April with my Chinese colleague Vice Premier of the State Council Wang Yang and this question will be finally agreed on this plane (plane 2020 - a joint wide-body airliner project of Russia and China)."

According to Rogozin, IAC has a solid status among international certification companies, so it needs no additional licence acquisition to do its work.

"The Chinese have an agency similar to IAC, but it is a national one and can certify only planes for the national airlines," Rogozin said. "Therefore, China needs to join an international organisation. IAC is more preferable, because there they can occupy a worthy place."

The Russian deputy prime minister said that the proposal to join IAC was made by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting with Premier of the Chinese State Council Li Keqiang. Rogozin added that at the forthcoming meeting with Wang Yang it would be necessary to agree on a roadmap for China’s accession to IAC.

IAC is a civil aviation body for ex-Soviet states that was formed on the basis of the intergovernmental Agreement on Civil Aviation and Air Space Use, signed in late December 1991.