Yuri Slyusar, Head of the United Aircraft Corporation, in an interview with TASS on the sidelines of SPIEF-2023 spoke about the current state of the program to increase production of passenger aircraft Tu-214 and its prospects for the development of new versions.
According to him, the work is carried out in two parallel lines, the first – to increase the volume production and the second – to replace some foreign items in the interior of the aircraft.
The Tu-214 is being built at the Kazan aircraft plant named after Gorbunov in the interests of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. Gorbunov in the interests of the Defense Ministry and special flight squadron “Russia” in the quantity of one or two aircraft a year. The UAC chief reminded that the task now is to reach 10, and then 20 aircraft a year.
“Therefore the plant has a lot of work ahead, a whole program of technical re-equipment, expansion of the technological bottlenecks at the plant, equipment, hiring of personnel and cooperation work. So, for the Tu-214, for the Kazan plant, this is such a serious number, of course, taking into account that the plant is still a strategic aircraft,” said Yuri Slyusar.
He specified that some individual items of the interior need to be replaced with domestic analogues. “The list of the Tu-214 is not long, but some individual positions had time to appear during the production. This is, for example, some of the interior equipment. Our task is to reach ten aircraft per year by 2025,” said the UAC General Director.
He also spoke about the prospects for other versions of the Tupolev Tu-214, on which the Tupolev designers are working and which concern changes in the appearance of the airliner.
“We still want to get a certain improvement in the functionality of certain systems. Globally, the process of deep modernization of the Tu-214, with the creation of a shorter version and a version with increased range, with the implementation of new navigation modes, the transition to, relatively speaking, the next generation of aircraft Tu-214 is a separate topic. A decision has not been made yet. But we are working on it and putting together proposals. We hope that we will be able to get support here, to kick-start this process,” said Yuri Slyusar.
Increasing the rate of production of the Tu-214 aircraft was a forced measure after the break with Russia of international cooperation and all supply chains of aircraft and components from the U.S. and the EU after the sanctions against the domestic civil aviation. The MC-21-310 will not begin commercial operations until spring 2025 after the import substitution programme is completed and the type certificate for the MS-21-310RUS version is approved.
At the same time, it will take at least five years to reach the full-scale serial production of the MS-21 with an annual production capacity of 76 aircraft. In order to have a replacement for the Airbus and Boeing aircraft to be decommissioned by the Russian airlines in the next few years, it is necessary to increase the production of the Tu-214.
The MC-21 and Tu-214 are airliners of the same niche narrow-body medium-range aircraft but are not competitors at the same time. The maximum takeoff weight of the Tu-214 is more than 110 tons against the MS-21’s 79. Tu-214 flies farther (~6800 km vs. ~5500 at MS-21) and it has about 10% higher fuel consumption. But of all the differences between these two aircraft stand out three cardinal: MS-21 has two pilots in the cockpit, the aircraft is equipped with high-tech composite wing of great elongation (11.5 MS-21 vs. 7.7 Tu-214) and it is equipped with the new generation engines PD-14.
