After completing a set of repair and maintenance works and conducting the necessary tests, a Cubana Airlines Il-96-300 (CU-T1250) long-range wide-body passenger airliner took off from Voronezh from VASO airfield. A little less than an hour later it landed at Zhukovsky airport near Moscow, where it will undergo the necessary customs procedures, after which the airliner will take a course home to Cuba.
This IL-96-300 was delivered to the Cuban airline in December 2005 and carried out passenger transportation until February 2022. Three other airplanes of this type stopped performing flights even earlier due to Cubana’s lack of funds to maintain their airworthiness: the CU-T1251 received in 2006 flew intermittently until the summer of 2021, and the CU-T1254 – and only until 2013. The fourth IL-96-300 (CU-T1717), which was operated by Aeroflot until spring 2014 (the 1993-built RA-96008), managed to stay on the schedule for just over 2.5 years, from September 2014 to May 2017. Given its venerable age and solid operational record, it is unlikely that it will ever be able to take to the air again.
The CU-T1250 arrived for repairs in Voronezh in August last year. The overflight after completion of all necessary works took place on November 10, and on November 18 the plant saw the plane off on its long journey. It is expected that in the next few days it will be able to arrive in Havana and return to passenger transportation.
Cubana until the beginning of last year was the only airline that carried out commercial passenger transportation on Il-96-300. They stopped with us almost 10 years ago, in the spring of 2014, and since then Il-96-300s have been in service only at SLO Rossiya.
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