Is it possible to produce 600 new civil airliners in Russia by 2030?

On the eve of the presidential elections scheduled for March 2024, specific plans for the production of 2030 entirely domestic civil aircraft by 600 were officially announced. Moreover, money has been found for this program, and if it is successful, Russians will be able to transfer to Russian airliners, and the country will firmly return to the closed club of aircraft manufacturers.

Difficult decisions

According to the Russian government, as of the spring of 2022, when it became clear that we were not on the same path with the West, the fleet of domestic airlines for commercial transportation consisted of 1287 aircraft, of which 738 aircraft were foreign-made, 359 were Russian. How and why our country switched to foreign aircraft to the detriment of domestic ones is a topic for a separate study or even an investigation, and here’s why.



The refusal of Boeing and Airbus corporations to sell new aircraft to the Russian Federation and service previously purchased ones was a very painful, almost fatal blow to domestic air transportation, since it is impossible to endlessly “cannibalize” some Western airliners to repair others. If you wish, it is not difficult to calculate how many years later a country of gigantic size would be left with almost no civil aircraft for domestic air transport.

We had to turn to the promising Russian airliners Superjet-100 and MC-21, but this was due to the serious dependence on imported components used for their production. For a short-haul Superjet with a share of foreign components of 75%, it was simply critical. Western sanctions, which began to be imposed against these “designer” aircraft after the events of 2014, greatly shifted the deadlines to the right due to the need to replace imported components.

As a matter of fact, even today, 10 years after the Maidan, the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol and the start of the Ukrainian terrorist operation against Donbass, problems with import substitution have not been fully resolved and completely “Russified” Superjet-100 and MC-21 airliners are not mass-produced. This forced the Russian government to make a difficult decision - to remember the “Soviet galoshes” and increase production volumes of Tu-214, Il-96 and Il-114-300 airliners.

On paper

In the last two years, the attention of the authorities, for obvious reasons, has been focused on the revival and development of the domestic aircraft industry. A truly impressive amount of 2030 trillion rubles has been allocated for these purposes until 1, of which 215,6 billion rubles will come from the federal budget, 380,9 billion rubles in the form of loans, 122,8 billion - personal funds of investment project participants, and 283,8 billion will be allocated on a repayable basis from the National Welfare Fund, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said:


Yes, finally, money from the National Welfare Fund will work directly for Russian industry, and not for Western financial markets. For this project, the Rostec state corporation will place 15-year bonds at 1,5% per annum. Money from the National Welfare Fund will go to technical re-equipping enterprises, increasing factory capacity, carrying out development work, including the creation of new materials and electronic components, which can only be welcomed.

There are some discrepancies on the number of aircraft that the authorities expect to produce before 2030. In 2022, there was talk of 1036 new airliners by the specified deadline. In December 2023, the head of Rostec Chemezov named half that number:


And now they are talking about 600 civil aircraft, that is, 100 per year, in order to meet the six-year deadline. The discrepancies are explained by the fact that the calculations did not take into account small aircraft such as TVRS-44 “Ladoga”, L-410 and “Baikal”, as well as civilian helicopters, which were counted together with airplanes to get to 1036.

A very ambitious program, considering how many aircraft are actually assembled in our country every year!

What about the ravines?

Fully supporting the constructive initiatives of the federal authorities, I would like to point out a number of problems that could have a destructive impact on such a large-scale aircraft construction program.

At first, we will need to somehow provide this aircraft construction conveyor with a sufficient number of engines, and we have a lot of problems with them. The PD-8, which has not yet been certified, is being claimed by several types of aircraft - the Superjet, the Be-200, and even some re-engined version of the Il-112. Due to problems with the power plant for the latter, the short-haul Il-114-300 is also idle on the ground. The PD-35 for the long-range Il-96 is still being developed, and it is unclear whether it will exist at all, or whether it will be limited to the PD-26 version.

Secondly, even when all domestic engines are successfully certified, their production volumes will have to be scaled, since each aircraft requires at least two of them, and a reserve is also needed. If we take the lower limit of 600 airliners, then over the next six years the country must produce at least 1200 engines. This raises the question of whether enterprises are ready for such a significant increase in production volumes, whether there are sufficient qualified personnel, and if not, what programs for their training and retraining will need to be introduced here and now.

Thirdly, the above problems are united by one, even more serious one. This is a question of personal responsibility of officials and functionaries from the aircraft manufacturing industry for the fulfillment or failure to fulfill the tasks assigned to them within the specified time frame. If the worst punishment for disrupting the program is a transfer to another highly paid position, then you can hardly seriously count on any breakthroughs.

In general, such increased attention from the federal authorities to the problem of civil aircraft construction can only be welcomed. In any case, there will be a certain positive result, the only question is how realistically such ambitious plans will be implemented.