The West declared the Russian liner MS-21 war to destroy?

Apparently, the Russian civil liner MS-21 declared war on destruction. Strikes on a promising aviation project are streaming one after another. Why is the domestic novelty causing such unhealthy interest, and where to expect new dirty tricks?





MS-21 is indeed a rather interesting aircraft with a good future. Unlike foreign competitors, the liner has the widest fuselage in the class, which objectively distinguishes it in terms of comfort among others. The use of composite materials in the design of the wings should make the Russian aircraft more economical, which also works for him in the eyes of potential operators.

Of course, it would be somewhat naive to expect that the impudent newcomer would immediately put the Boeing and Airbus on the shoulder blades, but launching it in mass production would be a real step towards restoring the domestic civilian aircraft industry and gradually reducing its dependence on foreign aircraft. Is it any wonder that the project began to undergo constant “hitting” by ill-wishers?

At first, The US Treasury banned the supply of composite materials from which to build innovative wings of the liner. This immediately sharply shifted the timing of the start of serial production of the aircraft.

Secondly, at the request of the United States in Italy, a case was instituted against the top manager of the UAC, Alexander Korshunov. The latter was collecting technical information that was supposed to help in the creation and improvement of the characteristics of the promising Russian PD-14 engine. It is this power plant that should be installed on the MC-21, as an alternative to the American Pratt & Whitney PW1400G engine.

Thirdly, against the domestic liner, a real information war began, built on "leaks" from the manufacturing company. The day before, there were reports that during the test flight of the MS-21, a malfunction occurred on it, according to the UAC:



Fortunately, everything worked out, the liner sat down safely. It turned out that the cause of an emergency could be the incorrect operation of the chassis output indication, but it worked. That is, nothing catastrophic happened. Rather, on the contrary, during the tests, some “jambs” are the norm, since the aircraft purposefully load to the maximum in order to identify bottlenecks and eliminate them in a timely manner.

The question is different. Why is the completely routine test work of domestic aircraft manufacturers becoming public knowledge, which is hard to imagine in the same West? Famous aviation expert Roman Gusarov comments on this:



The fact that in Russia there is no freedom of speech, after this you can not stutter. But this is, rather, an abuse of it to the detriment of the Russian aircraft industry. In fact, there is a real information war against the MS-21 project.

There is another interesting point. The liner currently consists of approximately 40% of imported components. Apparently, the problems arose precisely in the details of foreign production. The aforementioned Ruslan Gusarov clarifies that aircraft manufacturers faced the same problems earlier on the Superjet:



Indeed, the Superjet is idle on the ground, mainly due to the extremely poor quality of the engine, which was specially developed for this project by the European company Safran, and for some reason it does not use it anywhere else. In this regard, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that not only Russian PD-21s, but also American Pratt & Whitney PW14Gs should be installed on the MS-1400. The reputation of this US company is, to put it mildly, not perfect. Last year, the European concern Airbus found defects in 30% of Pratt & Whitney engines.

I don’t want to “croak”, but no matter how the story with the “Superjet” repeats itself. The fact that there is an alternative in the form of its own PD-14 is very good, but it is noteworthy how the United States is trying to push Russian engines away.