Jingmen's Zhanghe Aviation Park Builds Full-Chain Low-Altitude Economy with 50 Companies and 15,000 Flight Hours in 2025

Jingmen, in Hubei province, is building out a low-altitude economy that combines research, testing, certification, maintenance, operations, and commercial applications inside the Jingmen Aviation Industrial Park, a 25-square-kilometre zone described as one of China's first comprehensive general aviation industry demonstration zones and the only such zone in Hubei. The park's hub, Zhanghe General Airport, is described as the country's only A1-category general aviation airport equipped with two land runways and one water runway, with access to approximately 2,600 square kilometres of airspace and nearly 300 flyable days per year.

Nearly 50 aviation-related companies are now based in the park, including seven aircraft manufacturers, with 13 types of aircraft in production or development. The park has built five public service platforms covering flight testing, inspection, airworthiness certification, maintenance, and pilot training. In 2025 these platforms supported more than 15,000 flight hours and over 30,000 sorties, according to Hu Yuan, deputy director of the Jingmen Aviation Industrial Park Service Center.

The park's technological anchor is the Special Vehicle Research Institute under Aviation Industry Corporation of China, which conducts research partly in Wuhan while concentrating testing and production in Jingmen; the site has served as a testing base for aircraft including the AG600 amphibious aircraft. One prominent product is the AS700 Xiangyun manned airship, capable of carrying up to 10 passengers, remaining airborne for up to 10 hours, and travelling up to 700 kilometres, with cumulative orders exceeding 200 units, Hu said. Jingmen is promoting an integrated model pairing the airship with routes and tourism services, and applications developed at the park span tourism, emergency response, logistics, agriculture, education, and urban management, alongside a cross-provincial low-altitude freight route.

Hubei Hephaestus Aviation Services Co received a civil aviation maintenance licence in August, authorising it to conduct scheduled inspections on several Bell helicopter models and major overhauls of Robinson R44 helicopters. General manager Zhou Youwu said the company chose Jingmen partly because repaired aircraft can undergo post-maintenance flight checks directly at the adjacent airport, and the company plans to expand into component and engine overhaul.

This case illustrates a cluster strategy: instead of a single manufacturer or a single airfield, a region ties airspace access, an airport with the right runway and category profile, and shared service platforms into one location so that companies do not each have to build testing, certification and maintenance capacity on their own. The five public service platforms — flight testing, inspection, airworthiness certification, maintenance, and pilot training — function as shared infrastructure that lowers the fixed cost of entry for smaller manufacturers and service providers.

Maintenance providers such as Hubei Hephaestus illustrate how proximity to an operating airport can be a deciding factor in where a repair station locates, since it lets a shop run post-maintenance flight checks without ferrying aircraft elsewhere. The AS700 airship's order book and its pairing with tourism routes point to how new aircraft types can be commercialised locally, tying manufacturing directly to an operating market rather than treating production and revenue as separate steps.

What happens with the freight route, the pace of new aircraft types moving from development into production, and whether Hubei Hephaestus follows through on its stated plan to add component and engine overhaul will indicate whether the park's shared-platform model keeps attracting operators beyond its initial base of manufacturers.