Right now the PD-14 and PS-90 are being assembled in the same factory. They are basically assembling a worse engine that takes more man hours to build.
I suspect it is a case that so many orders for both engines right now means taking one out of production to focus on production of the other will cause a gap where less engines are delivered... plus while we know the PD-14 is a fully tested engine, do we know its cost... it might be two or three times the price of the PS-90.
I remember that was the problem with the PS-90 replacing the D-30 because the PS-90 was 6 million dollars per engine, while the D-30 was 800 thousand dollars per engine... so for an aircraft like the Il-76 that means 24 million for four engines vs 3.2 million for four engines... now I suspect maintenance costs will be higher but countering that engine life might be better, buy you are going to have to fly those two planes for quite a long time before the one with the more expensive engines burns 21 million dollars less fuel... especially with military planes that probably get fuel at a cheap rate and are not worried by noise and pollution legislation in western countries.
I think the goal is to get aircraft out as fast as possible and then start changing engines and production... because changing engines will delay production right now when they want flyable planes to replace the foreign planes they have. Once they have Russian planes in service they can look at optimising their performance to get better profitability... or perhaps the Air Force might want to buy some and fund the development for better engines and the airlines can get it done for them on the cheap the way the Boeing and Airbus does things.
Now that the engine contract to sell D30 engines to China for the Y-20 and H-6K has basically stopped, other than producing engines for the MiG-31 and maintaining the legacy Il-76 fleet, they have a giant factory which is probably doing little much of anything.
Should point out the D30 engine in the old Il-76 and the D30 engine in the MiG-31 are not the same... the D30s in the civilian aircraft are the D-30KU on the Il-62M, the D-30KU-154 on the Tu-154M and the D-30KP(2) which is used on the Il-76, Il-78, A-50, and A-40, while the engine in the MiG-31 is the D-30F6... AFAIK they are not related except for a simile designation.
As for Kuznetsov, the sooner they switch from producing three engines for the bombers, to a single one for the PAK DA the better.
They should be producing two now because the Backfire and Blackjack should be able to operate with the same engine, but the introduction of the PAK DA will likely require its own engine.... the engine on the Tu-160 is not ideal for a subsonic long range bomber... a high bypass turbofan would be better, but I suspect higher flight speed could be achieved with a low bypass turbofan.
As far as having a lot of different companies only interested in working at their previous capabilities, even if we have (at least in paper) too many old (but non competitive alternatives) for some power or thrust range, but nothing in important niches, that is to be corrected.
Hopefully companies can be lured to produce newer engine models with a factory upgrade and retooling fund package that would be probably needed to get them making the newer engines...
It is a waste at this moment to try to dedicate resources to either copy a foreign engine or to restart production of an engine from the 1960s, if something in that power range is already being developed by another russian company.
Totally agree... the effort to properly reverse engineer an existing engine should not be underestimated... countries don't do that for fun, they do that because they have not alternative and don't have the 10 years to develop and get working properly their own engines.
Russia has its own engines in development and the extra money and resources put into copying something they are using should be put into the new stuff to replace it instead of copying the old stuff. If some operators want to keep using the old engines they can buy up the engines of all the companies and customers that want the new engines so they should be right for the old engine for the life of the airframes they have. They will of course have to work out supply and support issues for parts etc to keep those running, but that is why they probably want to keep them because they are familiar with how they work and they are simple.
I was thinking at the VK-650 since it is a simple engine and they do not need to use too advanced technologies in this. They just need to make in a relatively short time a new engine which is better than engines designed 50 years ago.
Agree, they need to set up support so it works out cheap and easy to support, which is what I think the current users are worried about and wanting to stick with the old engines.
It is like a Lada car... nothing amazing about it, apart from its simplicity and ease of repair with basic tools. With a modern European car you need a computer and they wont just let anyone access to the software that is needed to use a laptop to find faults and work out how to fix them.
John Deere are the same with their new farm equipment that is all electronic and they wont allow the owner to do anything at all... which is partially understandable because you let some idiot have full access to the systems and their capacity to stuff things up would make support a nightmare, but for little things you would think they would add remote access so a farmer in the middle of nowhere doesn't need to send his tractor 1,000km to the nearest service centre to find it was only a minor problem that the farmer could have fixed on site and not lost access to his tractor at a critical period of his harvest for a week.
I am sure most bush pilot would love to be able to sort most basic problems themselves and then leave more important stuff to full overhauls.
Was watching a Youtube video the other day with a pilots whose plane of choice had moved from a piston propeller to a turboprop design and he said his overhauls now cost $800K which he can't afford with his current business model, so it is important to perhaps have training for overhauling new engines in Russia available so airlines can perhaps pay for an engineers education or two to support these engines so they can do the work inhouse and not keep throwing money at the engine makers for minor things... obviously if they pay for their education then those engineers would be contracted to those airlines till they got their moneys worth.
I did hear a case of a chap who joined the Army in the officers programme and they paid for his University time and paid his wages too so he was earning much more than your average student was and when it came to the final exam in a critical paper he failed... quit the army and completed that last paper with his own money. I believe they managed to sort things out, but what a dirty thing to do... some people have no shame.
Moving forward part of the issue with engines is design... what I mean is you see a lot of single engined fighter aircraft and also a lot of twin engined fighter aircraft, but the triple engined fighters are restricted in modern times to exotic aircraft like Yak-38s and Yak-141s, and four engined fighters are rare... Tu-128s aside.
In civilian aircraft singles and twins and triples and four engined aircraft are normal but the trend is for fewer engines.
In a future where a jet engine stops being the main form of propulsion but instead becomes the electricity generator on an aircraft that has electric motors... propellers or jet engines and then there becomes more flexibility.
A VK-1600 might be too powerful for smaller aircraft, but could be just right for a small aircraft that needs to be VSTOL.
Having four electric motors running four electric propellers on the wingtips of a plane with two main wings that can rotate left to right by maybe 10-15 degrees but can rotate from directly forward to directly backwards is going to need power so a VK-1600 might do better than four smaller engines on each wing.
You might even just have wings that can be angled up to 45 degrees like a Crusader with wingtip motors that can be angled left and right 15-20 degrees... would be an interesting bush plane.
The point I am trying to make is that engines can be APUs in the future too which expands their potential.
AFAIK the idea behind the PD series is that they are modular and scalable so any engine size and power you want you can create an engine based on the existing model without having to start from scratch so it might take 4-5 years instead of 10-15 years.
That is a good idea.