In his extremely lengthy interview, the head of the Rostec corporation Serhii Chemezov not only admitted that the situation with the economy in the russian federation was the same as before the collapse of the USSR, but also outlined another problem - approximately from 2030, the biggest problems in civil aviation will begin in the russian federation.
"I think that from 2030, there will be a noticeable withdrawal of foreign aircraft from russian airlines, as there won't be much opportunity to repair them," Chemezov said in an interview with russian "RBK".
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It should be noted that Boeing and Airbus left the russian market. In addition, russian planes are prohibited from flying to the USA and Europe. All this led to the fact that about 550 Western-made airliners were left without spare parts, which, although formally, was about 65% of all russian passenger planes, but these planes performed 95% of all flights.
As of March 2023, there were about 470 Boeing and Airbus aircraft in airworthy condition. More up-to-date statistics could not be found, but the trend is quite clear.
So Chemezov proposed a way out of this situation: "it will be necessary to make a sufficient number of different aircraft by this time. First of all, of course, these are the MS-21, Superjet, Tu-214, Il-114, Il-96. These civilian aircraft should provide all our airlines".
That is, in six years, the russian federation should produce about half a thousand airliners – this is definitely an unrealistic scenario. At the same time, Chemezov himself knows this very well, because in 2023 the aircraft factory in Kazan (aka KAPO) could not deliver a single Tu-214. Moreover, by 2030, even according to the plan, only 70 of these aircraft should be produced, of which not all will be passenger liners.
Production of Il-96, which made its first flight back in 1988, does not differ in mass – a maximum of one aircraft per year. Moreover, only 33 aircraft were assembled in total for the entire time.
As for the Superjet, since 2019, after spending more than 2 billion dollars, they has not yet solved a problem of how to replace imported assembly parts. As with the MS-21 - the main problem in the engines of the PD family. Supply of the MS-21 has again actively shifted to the right, now for 2025-2026, because it still cannot pass the test. At the same time, the production of the aircraft was supposed to start in 2016.
The Il-114 is the second attempt to launch an aircraft that was created back in the USSR to replace the An-26. It made its first flight back in 1990. After only 20 aircraft were produced, it was no longer needed and production ceased. Since 2014, the aircraft has been dusted off, they decided to install new TV7-117 engines and added the Il-114-300 index.
After the crash of the Il-112 military transport in 2021 due to an engine fire, tests of the Il-114-300 were suspended and resumed only at the end of March 2024. At the same time, the military IL-112 is planned to be converted from the TV7-117 to the already mentioned PD-8 engines. But the passenger IL-114 is not.
That is, in the russian federation, the problem with civil aviation is complex and quite predictable, because there is no stable production of airliners and they are talking about production capabilities of 1-2 passenger planes per year. While for a closed totalitarian country, the reduction of foreign passenger traffic is not a problem, for the russian federation the main and critical problem is the provision of domestic flights.
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