Il-112V/Il-212 light military transport

The propfan is not for the Il-112, it is for the Il-476 to pretty much turn it into an AN-70 (ie lower flight speed to make it a better platform for dropping troops and vehicles for the VDV). Vlad mentioned that it would be useful to have an aircraft with a 10 ton payload that could operate from rough strips of land (Sand and Snow specifically), which I would think a modification of the Il-276 except instead of two jet engines it could have two of the prop fans that the Il-476 would be fitted with for its paradrop role... it would lower the flight speed of the Il-276 and enable it to operate from shorter airstrips but probably reduce operational costs and improve flight range with a reduction in flight speed.

The propfan would not be developed instead of anything else but could be made from an existing engine type as they seem to be wanting engine families to expand their capacity to make a lot of different engines in different power ranges without having to develop them all from scratch.

Such a propfan would probably also be useful on other platforms like the Be-200 and other aircraft too depending on thrust.

Well they said there was an error in the design, so the obvious solution is fix the error and make the plane they were supposed to be making and everything should be fine.

so its not like they wouldn't have the facilities there to get that Il-112 that was used for load testing into the air …. assuming it wasn't load tested to destruction …. would seem to make sense to use it - if its already there ? I have no idea what happened to it - but it is in the right place … and it seemed to pass the load tests pretty easily ?

If the current flying model is made to the wrong design then would not the one used for load testing also be of the old design?

That would mean it would be ok to make sure the flying model wont fall apart in flight but the results from either would not really reflect the performance of the final model so any results you get from either would not be worth finding out.

Fix the design and build it ASAP and test that and then just start making as many as you can... and see if you can upgrade the engines and propellers to get as much performance out of them that you can.

you are a pseudo-scientist … you have no idea what you are talking about

Not sure I like being spoken to like this by someone so new to this forum... especially seeing as how my ignorance is based on your posted information.

I give you a primary source of data from the lead engineer he says the 2nd series of prototypes will be 500kgs over the design weight
they trimmed 2082kgs off it

You posted a comment saying "he said they had already reduced the weight for the 3rd prototype by 2082kgs by May 2019
and he had further weight reductions planned for another 500kg by the time production starts "

Which to me suggests the first prototype was built with flaws in the design, and this comment above stated the 3rd prototype will be just over 2 tons lighter and that the serial models will be a further half a ton lighter, so in my ignorance... you then confirm this by saying he said:

"he referred to the 3rd plane as 0103 …. so they look like they will build the next couple of prototypes 2082kgs lighter than the first 2"

2500 - 2082 = 418kg = 2% overweight
… 2% is statistically insignificant … anything below 5% is … you know this don't you … you know the yield curve around standard deviations from the mean curve …. I'm sure you do ….. being the genius you are
prototypes 3 & 4 …. will give valid data for the production model ...

I must be a genius because that is exactly what I suggested... perhaps you are retarded?

meanwhile …. the aerodynamic form which is usable up to max load ….is valid
question is do you need ballast to fix a centre of gravity issue in the basic airframe
hence you will lose max load …..

Yeah, you are a dick... they are still at the prototype stage... why would you not adjust the design to correct the flaw... shift the wing forward or back or change the angles the control surfaces can trim the aircraft at... instead you suggest a dead weight to carry around for the life of the aircraft...

let me guess being the genius you obviously are …. you think that the guy that heads Illyushin aero design … doesn't know what or where the COG is ….
give me a break …. seriously

How about the  that you so clearly are pull your head in before I give you a short period on the bench to think about what has been said about manners and behaviour.

The head of Il is hardly the guy that punches in the numbers for the digital model for the aircraft on the computer design software they are using... he will be too busy every night counting the floats in the tills.  

So what it is basically saying is that the next test flights are to be delayed till November while the runway gets upgrades and improvements, but that the changes they are making will take until early next year anyway...

The point is that the Russian military have records of current and recently passed uses for the An-26... information about what was transported and how far and what happened when the An-26 was no enough for the job and what they had to use instead.

They also know what new things are coming in to service over the next few decades and they can work out how that might change what needs to be moved and how far.

For instance at the moment they might have to move light UAV car sized vehicles... perhaps 2-2.5 tons each around the place... say 600-1,500km range hops to support normal operations... they might also transport a similar weight of ammo or fuel or weapons over similar distances with these aircraft.

Future requirements might involve heavier vehicles and larger quantities of fuel or ammo or troops... a group of 15 soldiers in old gear might weigh 3 tons, but with the new Ratnik gear might weigh 4 tons for instance so sometimes extra payload or range or internal capacity/space is needed for expected future use.

It all comes down to future planning... but of course it might turns out that the new aircraft will require Il-476 aircraft able to carry 62 ton payloads because their tanks will go from weighing about 48 tons to weighing about 52 tons so rather more il-476 aircraft will be purchased, and with more of those around sometimes it is quicker and easier to pack more smaller loads together into a larger aircraft to get the job done... it all depends on where it is going and what aircraft are available at the time.

An Il-476 with four propfan engines would be ideal for the VDV for dropping troops and around the place, but for every other service four high bypass turbofans offers better speed and general performance.

An Il-276 also improves the flight speed of the An-12 and would be better for most uses, except short and rough field ops where an Il-276 with the same propfan engines developed for the VDV model of the Il-476 could be used for better rough operations near front lines. Many users of the aircraft would probably prefer high bypass turbofans for faster flight speeds and better performance over longer distances.

How come no1 in Russia, AFAIK, suggested that by now, if it is such a good idea?

Probably because they haven't got the Il-276 design fully finalised yet so they don't know what sort of short field performance it will be able to achieve, and simply because the engine it will be using is not ready yet then alternative variants like propfans have not really been seriously considered yet.

It all depends on what happens with the VDV... they might just accept the higher flight speed of the Il-476 with the new high bypass turbofan engines, or perhaps they might get a special model aircraft with blown flaps to enable lower flight speeds with heavy payloads to be safely used to allow more compact delivery of payloads and troops during operations... if that is the case a similar solution could also be applied to the Il-276 for short rough strip operation and they might end up not needing to develop propfans, but propfans seem to be a useful technology that might replace turboprops in some applications... they just need to work out all the advantages and problems and apply them as a solution where the advantages makes them really more useful and the problems are not relevant in that use.

It is not enough for it to make sense, if it is not the cheapest simplest option then other solutions should be considered too.

In comparison spending enormous amounts of money on untested and unproven technologies like tiltrotors when high speed helicopter design could deliver almost the same speeds but cheaper and simpler is not a good solution either.

Tilt-rotors, quad-rotors &/ tandem rotor helos could be as good, if not better for those applications.

They certainly could be just as good or perhaps even marginally better, though I doubt it... the Mi-26 has a similar payload capacity of an An-12 but nothing like the flight range or cost per hour of operation or flight speed... just as you would never consider replacing the An-12 with just lots of Mi-26s, you couldn't really consider replacing the Il-112 or An-26 with a tilt rotor aircraft, because while tilt rotor aircraft might be faster than helicopters, they aren't faster than conventional aircraft we are talking about and the problem of replacing the An-26 does not include a requirement for vertical take off or landing capacity, so tandem rotor helicopters and tilt rotor helicopters are not really being considered in this case... even less so when talking about Il-267 or Il-476s.

If they r going to order a 100 Il-476s, not to mention a few dozen Il-478s, as was reported, how many Il-276/112s per year will they be able to produce at the same time?

Being much smaller and lighter aircraft the Il-276 and Il-112s and indeed the Il-114s that will also be made could be made in the much larger number of smaller aircraft factories that are too small to build bigger aircraft... in fact if you include all the old An-2s that are getting close to the end of their lives there is enormous potential for producing a lot of planes over the next decade or so because there are a lot of aircraft that wont see the end of the 2020s in service with the Russian military or in civilian operators hands and they will need to be replaced.

As an example Aviakor in Samara, that used to produce tu 95, and was supposed to produce An 140, is now out of order and bankrupt. It could be renationalised and used for an additional production line for transport aircrafts.

There would be a lot of factories in Russia that would love some solid orders from the government for new aircraft, and they could earn a good living with those orders plus civilian orders for the civilian equivalent that will also run out of airframe life over the next decade or two which also need replacement.

Their activities in the far east and arctic regions building new airfields would be wasted if they don't also build new planes to operate from those new airfields with new avionics and systems compatible with the new airfields and designed to operate in Russian conditions.

A few nice stiff tariffs against foreign aircraft operating in Russia will further boost production and support, something they really could not consider in the early 2000s because of WTO rules and government interference in the free market and all that bullshit the west would have complained about, but that wont work these days with the US actively trying to damage other countries economically with sanctions and tariffs...

Why not support the Russian civilian and military aviation industry, but make sure they don't think they have a free ride, that they have to work hard to make the best product they can make, which could have potential in foreign markets that are not closed to Russia.