MOSCOW, July 18 (AVN) - The Defence Ministry will sum up results of the tender for the best project of the combat and training plane with a piston engine in September 2001, a competent source in the Sukhoi design bureau told the Military News Agency on Wednesday.
The most likely winners are SU-49 (original denomination SU-32) designed by the Sukhoi bureau and YAK-152 (previous denominations YAK-56 and YAK-54M) developed by the Yakovlev design bureau, the source said.
The Defence Ministry will need several hundreds of planes for preliminary training and advanced flight training. Their main operators will be the Russian Sports and Defence Technical Society (ROSTO) and flight colleges of the Air Force. The aircraft are likely to be fitted with equipment for both types of training, the source stressed.
Conditions of the tender state that financing of the plane's development is to be provided by developers themselves, but the customer undertakes to purchase a co-ordinated number of planes.
The aircraft designed by Sukhoi is powered by the M-14 piston engine. The share of elements made of composite materials may reach 75 percent of the airframe's total weight. The cost of research and tests related to SU-49 development is estimated at about USD8.5m. According to experts, the expenses will pay off after the sale of first 300 planes.
YAK-152 has the same power plant, but is fully made of aluminium alloys.