RuAviation

Alexey Kubasov, appointed Director of the Yakovlev Engineering Centre, spoke in an interview with TG-channel ‘Notes of Aircraft Builders’ about the current tasks, the merger of Yakovlev Design Bureau and Regional Aircraft Branch, as well as further plans to complete import substitution and certification of MC-21-310 and SJ-100 aircraft.

Alexey Kubasov was born on 27 November 1976 in Klimovsk, Moscow Region. In 1999, he graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute with a degree in Aircraft Life Support and Protection Systems. At Sukhoi Design Bureau, he rose from design engineer to deputy head of department, after which he moved to Sukhoi Civil Aircraft (now a branch of PJSC Yakovlev – Regional Aircraft), where he took up the position of head of the design bureau in 2019.

– Alexey Viktorovich, what changes await the Engineering Centre in the coming months?

– As far as organisational issues are concerned, we should not expect any immediate changes. Our two design bureaus have differences in standards and structure, and we will have to analyse them in detail, but for now everything will remain as it is. The design bureau of the Regional Aircraft branch will continue to work according to its own standards, we will bring them to the corporate level with applicability only to the Superjet programme.

– Are there plans to finally merge the two design bureaus in the future?

– There is such a task, but it is an evolutionary, not revolutionary process. We will study the workload of the divisions and, where possible, we will try to balance it by redistributing internal resources. We will carry out a functional analysis of the departments of both design bureaus and flight test facilities, including technical groups of chief designers, in order to understand how to link them with each other.

There are a lot of preparatory steps on the way to such a design bureau format. We will set up our interaction with external services, directorates, the Logistics Department and other divisions. It will be necessary to unify procedures and introduce an electronic process of CD production in MC-21 Design Bureau. Together with the production sites, we will analyse the processes of configuration management and CD changes – here we will also need to come to a single standard. We already have a great deal of groundwork for unified principles of certification documentation development, and this is especially important in the context of creating import-substituted versions of MC-21 and SJ-100.

– What tasks do you set for the staff of the Engineering Centre, what is the most important now?

– Of course, it is the lifting of the MC-21 prototypes and the beginning of DCI [additional certification tests – ‘Aviation of Russia’ note], completion of the import substitution programme and launch of the aircraft in series. Our design bureau will now need to work in close coordination with flight test facilities, production and our suppliers in order to minimise time losses for rework, which, of course, are inevitable in the course of such large-scale development work. Having accomplished this task, we will work on expanding the operating conditions, making design changes and creating new modifications – modern aircraft programmes last for decades, so we have a lot of tasks, given that we also need to work for the future. I am sure that a good incentive for existing employees and an important factor in attracting new engineering staff to solve these tasks will be the increase of salaries of the Engineering Centre employees from October 1.

If we talk about global goals, we should become a globally recognised designer and manufacturer of civil aviation equipment – this is what we all should strive for, Alexey Kubasov said.