Kiko Fri Mar 18, 2022 6:32 pm
Tu-214 and IL-96: better late than never l. 18.03.2022
With regard to Russian civil aviation, 40 states have introduced restrictive measures that run counter to the provisions of international air law and the basic principles of the Chicago Convention, the Federal Air Transport Agency said.
On March 11, at an expanded meeting of the board of the Federal Air Transport Agency, the head of the department, Alexander Neradko, noted that flights to / through the airspace of European states are limited. Restrictions were introduced unilaterally only in relation to aircraft of the Russian Federation. At the same time, by taking illegitimate restrictive measures against the Russian aviation industry, the mentioned group of states ruled out the possibility of resolving the current situation through negotiations.
The Federal Air Transport Agency recommends that Russian airlines take into account the likely arrests and detentions of aircraft and temporarily suspend international flights. Air traffic within the country continues without restrictions. Also, flights of foreign airlines of countries that have not joined the sanctions and have not limited air traffic with Russia continue, the ministry said in a statement.
On March 16, a meeting of the Union of Mechanical Engineers of Russia was held, during which import substitution in key industries, primarily in the aircraft industry, was discussed. Rostec General Director Sergey Chemezov said in his speech that against the backdrop of sanctions, the possibility of resuming mass production of domestic Tu-214 and Il-96 aircraft is being considered, the press service of Rostec reported.
“In the context of serious restrictions on the operation of foreign-made civil aircraft, large-scale tasks are facing the domestic aviation industry. And they need to be solved in a very tight time frame. This primarily concerns the expansion of production of existing aircraft. In addition, it is necessary to consider the possibility of resuming the serial production of the medium-haul Tu-204/214 and the Russian wide-body airliner Il-96,” Chemezov said.
Tu-204/214 and Il-96 aircraft were in no way inferior to foreign ones in terms of reliability and comfort, but in a free market, when Airbus and Boeing passenger aircraft began to arrive in Russia en masse, domestic aircraft could not compete with them in terms of efficiency. In addition, when aircraft-building corporations provided material support to persons contributing to the promotion of aircraft A and B on the Russian market, the fate of domestic aircraft was a foregone conclusion.
In 2011, after the Yak-42 crash, in which the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv hockey team died, at a meeting to investigate the causes of the disaster and provide assistance to the families of the victims, questions were raised about the next steps in the development of domestic civil aviation. Russian President Dmitry Medvedevnotedthat the Government will have to make "a very difficult decision, because it is impossible to go on like this, with such a park."
“It's obvious, we have to support our own. If ours are not able to develop, it is necessary to buy aircraft abroad. But this is a separate topic, I will formulate it, this position, and I will give instructions to the Government. You will need to find money. It should be a big program,” Dmitry Medvedev said then in Yaroslavl.
Four days after the disaster, Presidentapproved the list of instructionsfollowing the results of the meeting, among which there was a paragraph that spoke about the adoption of urgent measures to ensure subsidizing the leasing of civil aircraft that meet modern airworthiness requirements, regardless of the state of the aircraft manufacturer, as well as to ensure subsidizing local and regional transportation.
More than ten years after those events and the start of subsidizing the leasing of "foreign cars" at the state level, the development of domestic civil aviation, having received billions of dollars of those subsidies settled in the pockets of Western "partners", today is seen in a completely different way. The decisions that were made at that time were dictated by a different political situation - there was no Crimea, no Donbass, no special operation Z yet. An assessment of those decisions is beyond the scope of this article. But efforts to restore the civil aviation industry after 2014 are not seen only by those who do not want to see them.
And if we are seriously talking about restoring the production of Tu-214 and Il-96, the leadership of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Rostec, UAC, UEC and responsible officials of the aviation industry need to move from talking to business and resolve these issues as urgently as possible: calculate the necessary costs, identify sources funding and the time it will take to restore the serial production of these machines. Our country needs them more than ever, just like the MS-21, SSJ-New, Il-114-300, Ladoga (TVRS-44) and Baikal (LMS-901).
https://aviation21.ru/tu-214-i-il-96-luchshe-pozdno-chem-nikogda/