Il-276 (SVTS) Medium Transport

It could be useful as this would allow additional cargo weight &/ fuel tanks for increased range/endurance for EW/SAR/tanker variants.

They seem very specific in wanting a 20 ton payload aircraft... the original Il-76 had a 40 payload capacity, but the Il-476 can carry reportedly up to 62 tons, though that is normally rounded to 60 tons.

AFAIK there are no plans for EW or SAR or tanker models for the Il-276, it is a middle weight aircraft which means heavier and smaller aircraft would be more valuable in the sense that a heavier aircraft could carry a better payload or more fuel, while a lighter aircraft has more benefits from being lighter and therefore rather cheaper...

They could buy them from China until a substitute is ready. If the plane is a temporary "stop gap", its engines can be so too. Russia-China relations is a 2 way street.

Stopgap aircraft are dead end aircraft that will cost rather more in the long run because their small production run will makes parts and servicing more expensive.

What will actually happen is that the Il-276 will be ready when it is ready and as An-12s retire as they get worn out they will use the old Il-76s instead until the new planes are ready.

Besides, with the IL-112 in mind, there is no guarantee it will come out according to specs, on time, & sell well abroad, with all those other competing current/future models from the Airbus, US, Ukraine, China & Brazil.

So you think Russia should buy a chinese transport plane because it has better chances of selling well internationally? What difference does that make for Russia?

Russia cares about replacing An-26 and An-12 aircraft in its own inventory. Such aircraft have also been sold rather widely internationally so there is a rather large market because most of those foreign aircraft are also nearing the end of their economic lives too and need replacement.

Most have been sold to former communist block allies or places where more rugged simple designs work best, but they don't have enormous pockets to begin with so it wont be a lucrative market anyway.

Russian military orders will subsidise the design and serial production of the types... if other customers order some then they can save some money. Countries in eastern europe will be looking to western types no matter what, so there is little chance there, but with sanctions too much red tape anyway.

The "stop gap plane" could turn into a long term like the An-12 is, & with many variants.

Russia would not benefit from having a chinese stopgap plane they continue to have to use.

Russia wants a new plane design that has commonality to its other operational aircraft... buying this chinese upgrade of the An-12 would be a huge step backwards for many reasons... first it wont have any commonality with any of its current in service aircraft so it will be another engine type it needs to buy for one aircraft type.

With the Il-276 it will use the same engines as the Il-476 so there will be standard engine use and spare parts commonality... the cockpits will be the same... the dimensions will be slightly smaller in some directions but the Il-276 will be able to carry similar shaped loads as the Il-476s... just 1/3rd lighter and over a shorter distance.

As an added bonus, it wouldn't harm; the main thing is maintaining a well balanced aircraft inventory. Recently Kazakhstan bought Y-8- if Russia had a comparable plane, it could be a different story:

Russia already has a comparable plane... the An-12 but it is getting rid of them from service.

Not exactly, it's a modified Chinese (& still being produced) variant of An-12.

You need to come up with a good reason why Russia should spend money on tooling up a new factory to build what is essentially an An-12 modified for Chinese production and conditions...

Why would Russia waste good money making an ancient copy of an even more ancient Soviet aircraft they have in service?

The Il-476 has a totally upgraded and modernised digital cockpit and presumably also cargo handling equipment too... the scaled down Il-276 will have the same cockpit and similar sophisticated all weather cargo handling equipment too.

The Y-9 is a follow on & very much alive; the USSR failed to develop & build its own & now Russia doesn't have a direct & less costly An-12 replacement.

It does, and it is called IL-276.

If it's not revived, they'll live to regret it. Even the US didn't give up on the C-130 & now using & selling 100s of C-130Js around the world.

Why?

Did the USAF regret buying C-17s instead of upgrading C-141s?

They don't bother with reviving YC-14 or making a twin engine YC-15/C-17 derivative.

They were test aircraft and were considered failures... and analogues of the An-72 which was successful.

So, good luck to the IL-276 makers & the VKS/VTA with it!

You are saying that they should just keep making An-12s?

The An-12 is a ukrainian owned soviet design... why continue that heritage when it will be alone in service in Russia?

It makes rather more sense for Russia to expand the Il-76 family to include a model to fill that role.

They could simply make some new build Il-76s with a 40 ton payload to do the job but it would not be very efficient, so what they are doing is scale back the size and weight and engine power of the Il-76 and make a smaller aircraft that could fill the role better and more efficiently.

It means rather less risk and you will be using the same engines as the Il-476 so there is more engine commonality and you don't need a new turboprop engine to be developed for the job.

On top of that C-130 was undergoing constant modifications and upgrades throughout it's existence while nobody touched An-12 since they were slapped together for the first time (in keeping with true Soviet tradition of technological obsolescence)

The C-130 was a piece of crap... slow, unpressurised, rattling piece of rubbish, but it is too small for serious armour so it is just a junk transport so there is no point in replacing it till you really really have to.

The An-12 is just as ordinary but it really needs to be replaced in Russian service.

To me, the IL-276 is the "damage control" project to plug the gap left from the 1990s. Russia isn't Brazil that needs a lot fewer such planes; most of her KC-390s will be build for export. Russia could get 50 Y-9-like planes for the fraction of $ & time spent.

There is no need to have a unique design for every role, and certainly no reason to keep perpetuating the An-12 design for any longer.

The Ukraine is an enemy state and Russia can expect no cooperation or support from that direction so now that they need replacements for their Ukrainian owned Soviet designs it makes sense to expand the range of Russian types already in use.

It is not efficient to use the IL-476 for the roles the An-12 or indeed the An-26 have been used... they are smaller lighter aircraft and do jobs the Il-476 is way to big for.

Hense it makes sense to make a scaled down Il-476 for the jobs the An-12 did and an even smaller aircraft for the jobs the An-26 did in the form of the Il-112 and Il-114.

Commonality with the Il-476 would make the Il-276 attractive on the international market for other countries wanting a newer aircraft in that weight payload range... the An-12 was sold fairly widely and they are needing replacement pretty soon.

It doesn't have to be 100% Chinese design

It wouldn't be a Chinese design... those aircraft you are suggesting are basically old Soviet designs with minor changes.

they could base it on An-12 & use Y-9 as a cross reference; it will have commonality with their An-12s that will soldier on for years to come

Their An-12s are at the end of their lives... once they are scrapped there will be nothing to soldier on.

The An-12 was a good aircraft for its time but technology has moved on... new avionics and new systems and new cargo systems and cargo standards.

They have already upgraded the Il-476 massively and adapted its avionics and cargo handling systems to meet the future needs of the Military... now all they need to do is take off two engines and shorten the body and wings a little bit and they have a replacement for an aircraft they don't have in production on their territory.

There r already facilities for An-12 maintenance & overhauls.

Which can be upgraded and retooled to maintain and service a newer aircraft once all the old clangers are gone.

They can use the same engines as the IL-112 or a new/upgraded type that will need to be built for it anyway.

But the aircraft they have selected to replace the An-12 is the Il-276 and it would take much longer to test the Il-276 with four turboprop engines than for two engines that are already fitted to its big brother, the ll-476..

The An-2 is even more ancient; the C-130 is likewise- from the 1950s; both r workhorses with deep modernization/upgrade potential, & that's why its being done.

The An-2 is a unique case of a design that does a very specific job very very well, so its replacement will be an all composite remake with improved aerodynamics and avionics and new engine and propeller. Hopefully the engine can be replaced with a Russian engine and it will continue to serve for a very long time.

The An-12 is just a transport plane and needs replacing by a larger aircraft with more internal space, and the Il-276 ticks all the important boxes.

But it won't be less costly: Program cost $600M Unit cost $35–40M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyushin_Il-276

An-12 Price: $7.650M http://www.virtairlines.com/db/Antonov%20An-12

It would cost way more than 600 million to do a complete redesign and modernisation of the An-12... and it would take three years just to digitise the design properly without modification.

The unit price of a brand new An-12 with upgrades and of course the cost of developing new engines from scratch would be vastly more than the cost of the Il-276 programme which they can piggy back on the back of the Il-476 programme and even use its engines...

They didn't regret stretching it & it was heavily used, but as a strategic airlifter it was no longer adequate with its narrow body & thus not worth restarting production. The AF needed STOL C-17s in big #s, but it killed the MD corp.; then gov. subsidized Boeing sold many of them to AF & abroad. Poor analogy!

You give wiki too much credit... the C-141 was not a good aircraft but the C-17 was a horrendous money trap... it was the beta test to what we now call the F-35.

Ie build factories all over the US... not in places with skilled labour or where the resources are located, but where there is high unemployment with a senator on important committees that decides who gets money in the military. Hire a bunch of local retards and quadruple the cost of manufacture but they will throw money at the programme because it means jobs in their electorate... the Pentagon realised early on they didn't need to ask for C-17s because they got funding for new planes whether they asked for them or not... and they used the same model with the F-35 and it worked too... it also make the aircraft horrendously expensive too and scattered the makers all over the place too... terrible, but they will call it a success...

The YC-15 wasn't a failure, becoming a de-facto C-17 prototype.

See above.

You could probably get 8-9 Il-476s for the price of one C-17... you could probably get 4-5 Il-106s for the price of one C-17... the C-17 programme is a sterling example of how to waste money that isn't yours...

Not alone, but with the An-2/124s- both r being "deeply" modernized & may/will be produced in RF under different names:

You are not understanding... the An-12 is nothing like the An-2 or the An-124... they have nothing in common, so keeping one or other of these aircraft makes no difference as to whether you bother to try to keep the other in service.

The An-2 is a complete reconstruction of an old effective and efficient layout with modern materials and avionics and systems... it looks the same as an An-2 like a modern 32 core 4 Ghz PC with 16 Gigabytes of RAM memory and a 12 gigabyte graphics card looks like a 286 IBM clone from the early 1990s.

The An-124 will likely get new engines and continue to operate for a short while but its days are numbered too.

The An-12 doesn't do anything particularly special or amazing and an Il-276 can easily replace it with the same engines as the Il-476 and the same cargo bay profile so they can carry the same types of cargo pallet... it will just be carrying fewer...

$ don't smell: why spend more when u can save? Iran still uses & upgrades its F-4s/5s/14s, C-130s, CH-47s & P-3s even though they came "from an enemy state"

Well how many export contracts has Iran achieved with their F-5 clones or any of those other types they keep flying?

You say money is a factor... what sort of sales can Russia expect with an ancient Soviet design already produced by China for export?

Will China appreciate selling the design to Russia and then have the low value of the ruble mean Russian made copies of Chinese copies of An-12s under cut them on the international trade market?

Russia needs to build aircraft that suit its needs first and copies of copies of ancient cold war aircraft don't make sense unless nothing else can do the job... like the An-2.

And even then a total upgrade and overhaul in design means it is really nothing like the original in actual fact.

In the long run, developing the IL-276 may benefit Russia but it may take longer & cost a lot more than they expect- it's the economic side effect of events in Ukraine that the West instigated to weaken Russia. Unwillingly, Russia falls into that trap.

Any extra money spent by Russia on the Il-276 goes in to Russian pockets... Russia was needing to replace the An-12 over the next decade of so anyway, and they were always intended to design and build that replacement with India... India pulled out because they didn't want a scaled down Il-476, but Russia does so now Russia can get exactly what it needs and wants... it would be rather stupid to now buy Chinese rip offs of An-12s.

All airplanes called 'Antonov' are permanently finished

Finished in Russian military service... they will continue to live on around the place for a few years yet... even if only in Chinese knockoffs...

In ur dreams only. Read the link I posted: it'll be revived & improved.

Technically the Soviet original is going to be totally replaced by a new, modern, Russian, composite, redesigned and upgraded model.

The shape is slightly different, better aerodynamics and much reduced weight retaining good strength through new materials and new much more capable avionics...

The An-12s share Soviet/Ukrainian designed engines with the IL-20s; they r produced at PMZ (Perm) & KMPO plants in Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivchenko_AI-20

Yeah, and are they still in actual production or are they just making spare parts. When the An-12s retire from Russian service there will not be much market for those engines so they will need to look at different engines to make.

If needed, they could be further upgraded & given more efficient props. Or just the 2 engines originally intended for An-22s/Tu-95s but with smaller diameter props could probably be used, with enough power to haul 25T or even 30T payloads.

The An-22 is gone from service and plans for the PAK DA to start production in the mid 2020s means the life of the Bear is counting down too.

And like the Neanderthal DNA that lives on in u & every1 of us, unless u/they r 100% Black Africans.

We also have plenty of redundant DNA from creatures we evolved from... including aquatic DNA from when we lived in the ocean... doesn't mean I wont drown in the water though...

Rodion_Romanovic wrote:When was AI-20 last produced?

Furthemore I believe that it was produced only for a few years in Perm (Russia).

They can maybe produce some spare parts for maintenance, but that's all.

Before maidan it was a problem also to get new D-18T engines for the An-124 from motor sich, because production (and the supply chain for it) had already been stopped for a few years. Once you stop production it is very costly to restart it (this is valid also for western companies).

Furthermore the AI-20 is an obsolete engine (more than 60 years old) and it makes no sense to modernise it because modern turboprops need a very different architecture.

Russia would benefit from an engine of this class and they will probably develop it, maybe doing an upscaled tv7-117 or a totally new design, but it will take time and now this is not the highest priority (they need first the big and very big engines, and than the smaller engines (800hp and 1500 hp) for.existing projects that mount foreign engines.

And even if they would go for an upgraded  AI20 they would have to spend the same time and money in redesign, development and testing than they would need for a really modern engine.

And the result would be a not so efficient engine that would find no equivalent civil application and no foreign customer save for desperate countries.

Totally new design?

No we don't do that here

Only incremental upgrades of decades old ones