“Tu” will not arrive then – Kommersant

The return to commercial operation of Soviet-designed Tu-204/214 aircraft, for the repair of which the Ministry of Industry and Trade allocated 15 billion rubles, is being delayed. Kommersant has learned that the delivery of two aircraft, which Red Wings planned to receive in April, is being postponed until the end of summer. The reason for the delay is the long search for a contractor to restore the salon. According to Kommersant’s information, the carrier planned to put these planes on flights to Turkey in the summer.

As Kommersant found out, the Red Wings airline will not lease the 15-year-old Tu-204 and the 14-year-old Tu-214 in the spring, as was planned by agreement with their owner, Ilyushin Finance JSC (IFC, both are included in ” Rostec). These are the first aircraft of this type, which a year ago decided to return to regular passenger traffic. Red Wings was their last commercial operator and retired the aircraft back in 2018. The decision to restore all 11 IFC aircraft (eight Tu-204/214, two Il-96 and one An-124) for 15.4 billion rubles. from the budget in June 2022 was announced by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. “The funds have been brought to the recipient, work is underway to restore the aircraft,” Kommersant was told at the ministry.

The lessor planned to deliver both aircraft to the carrier in April 2023. Now the date has been moved to July 31, about which the owner warned the operator in April. “There is no information about the next transfers yet, but the participation of the aircraft at the MAKS air show in the livery of the UAC in July, as planned, is in doubt,” one of Kommersant’s sources says.

The reason for the delay, according to Kommersant, was the protracted choice of a contractor to restore the salon.

As a source in the industry told Kommersant, the cost of such work starts from 20 million rubles, and the time frame is from two to four months. After the IFC notified Red Wings in January of this year that the deadlines were missed due to a problem with finding a company, the carrier offered its contractor to the lessor, NPP Foton. But as of April, no contractor had been selected. In addition, the lease agreement for both liners, which should have been signed back in December 2022, has not yet been concluded.

The IFC denies the difficulties with the restoration of aircraft. “On both sides, work is underway on the interior, on the Tu-214 the salon is just being handled by the Foton company,” Kommersant was told in the company. According to the representative of IFC, the scheduled date for acceptance of works is scheduled for the end of June. Preparations for re-airworthiness “are also on schedule.”

According to a Kommersant source in UAC, specialists from UZGA Engineering (Yekaterinburg) and KAPO Avia (Kazan) were involved as a contractor for restoring airworthiness.

“The work is actively going on, based on the possibilities, and all disagreements have been settled,” the interlocutor assured Kommersant. The signing of the lease agreement, according to him, is scheduled for July.

Red Wings confirmed that the company “planned to enter into service these aircraft at the end of the summer season.” Work on the restoration of the aircraft is proceeding within the agreed schedules, the airline says, refraining from details: “We are waiting for the first two cars in the summer and two more in 2024.” The press service of the UAC only clarified that the plans to exhibit the Tu-214 at MAKS, which will be held on July 25-30, “remain in force.”

The backbone of the Red Wings fleet is 19 SSJ-100s. According to Kommersant’s information, the carrier planned to put both “Tu” on flights to Turkey. The Tu-204-100 is designed to carry from 176 to 194 passengers, the capacity of the Tu-214 is 210 people.

The delivery time is “unpleasant for the carrier” but will not affect transportation in such a mass tourist destination as Turkey, Andrey Kramarenko from the Higher School of Economics believes. He admits that “for any airline, every undelivered aircraft is a lost profit”, but even the delivery of all four remanufactured aircraft is unlikely “to be of decisive importance for the carrier’s business.” According to the expert’s assumptions, in the end, aircraft flight time will not exceed 1.8 thousand hours per year, which is half the annual flight time of, for example, the A320: “Tu-214 has never been commercially effective.”

Aigul Abdullina