A Brief History of the MAKS Air Show – Kommersant

The MAKS air show, scheduled for the end of July 2023, was decided to be postponed to a later date, sources in the aviation industry told Kommersant. According to them, the decision is due to “security considerations.” The history of the air show is in the material “Kommersant”.

The first international aviation exhibition in Russia was held in 1911 in the Mikhailovsky Manege of St. Petersburg. Beginning since 1933 they are traditionally held in August, when the Day of the Air Fleet is celebrated, the airfield in Tushino became the venue for the air show. The first air show in the city of Zhukovsky was held in 1990 in front of the engineering building of the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute. After the collapse of the USSR, the aviation exhibition moved to Zhukovsky on a permanent basis. In 1992 it took place under the name “Mosaeroshow-92” on the basis of the Flight Research Institute (LII) named after Gromov.

In 1993 President Boris Yeltsin approved the territory of the FRI as a single venue for international air shows in Russia. At the same time, the event received its current name – the International Aviation and Space Salon (MAKS). Since then, MAKS, which gathers about half a million visitors and hundreds of participating companies every two years, has become the largest air show in Eastern Europe and one of the largest in the world. Until 2009 the exhibition was organized by the Federal Agency for Industry, then the duties were transferred to the Moscow government and Aviasalon JSC.

MAX 1995 considered the most unfortunate in the history of the event. It was unexpectedly missed by President Boris Yeltsin, and the show itself failed in terms of organization. MAKS survived another blow to its reputation in 1999, when Airbus refused to participate in the air show. But in 2001 the EADS concern took part in the air show. In the same year, a record attendance was set: 660,000 people attended the show.

Despite the fact that from the very beginning MAKS gathered many visitors, only in 2003, when the organizers began to focus on entertainment, he showed a profit, and in 2005 he also had a tangible business component – contracts for $ 4 billion. In 2011 the value of contracts exceeded $10 billion, and in 2013 was valued at a record $21.2 billion.

The last MAKS has passed from 20 to 25 July 2021. The event was under threat due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they did not cancel it. Vladimir Putin took part in the opening ceremony. Among the premieres were a layout of a promising single-engine fighter LTS (Checkmate / Shah-i-mat / Su-75), an MS-21-310 airliner (for the first time a modification with domestic PD-14 engines was shown), a Yak-40LL flying laboratory with a superconducting electric motor, heavy strike drone “Okhotnik” (dummy), aviation guided missile “Grom-E2”.