The AG600, codenamed Kunlong, comfortably spent one-hour flying at an altitude of 3,000 meters (9,800 ft) before safely landing back at the Jinwan Civil Aviation Airport in Zhuhai.

This enormous plane, around the size of a Boeing 737 with a wingspan of 38.8 m (127 ft) and a fuselage stretching 39.6 m (130 ft), has been designed for a variety of domestic applications in China, from civil rescue and firefighting functions to military defense purposes in the disputed South China Sea.

The design is being heralded as a landmark for Chinese aviation engineering with 98 percent of all the plane's components being made inside the country.

"It shows that the development of civil aviation industry in our country was lifted to a new level and that our capacity of independent research and development in this area has increased by a big margin," says Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Miao Wei.