BERLIN. May 28 (Interfax-AVN) - The Irkut corporation is going to build and sell to Russian and foreign operators at least 1,250 Yak-130 combat training aircraft.
"The market niche of Yak-130s is extremely large, for it is common knowledge that a massive decommissioning of combat trainers is likely to stark in 2010. About 2,500 aircraft of the type will be sold in the near future, and I have no doubts whatsoever that half of them will be ours. There are no rivals to Yak-130 by performance in the world now," corporation's CEO Oleg Demchenko told a press conference at the ILA2008 international aerospace show in Berlin.
Yak-130 got a preliminary certificate of compliance with the customer's requirements, which allowed starting the mass production of the aircraft. "Mention should be made, that the aircraft has passed all tests as a training aircraft. Now tests of its combat capabilities are to start," he said, adding that the combat employment tests are likely to be completed before this yearend.
Yak-130s are expected to be built at Irkut, according to the new plans, while the aircraft for experts were to be build there, and the ones for the Russian Air Force were to be assembled at the Sokol plant in Nizhny Novgorod.
The twin-seated Yak-130 combat trainer, developed by Irkut's affiliated company, the Yakovlev design bureau, was adopted as the basic and advance trainer for the pilots of the Russian Air Force in April 2002.
The avionics of the aircraft features the so-called open architecture configuration. Its reprogrammable digital flight-by-wire control system with quadruple reservation allows simulating the specifications of most existing and some future aircraft.
Yak-130 can land on and take off from unpaved airfields. It has a 10,000 flight hours of service life, plus relatively low maintenance costs. Its nine hard points can accommodate up to three tons of weapons.