MOSCOW. Sept 26 (Interfax-AVN) - Imperfection of Russian laws slows down development of the Russian-Indian IL-214 multipurpose plane, Viktor Livanov, director general of the Ilyushin aircraft enterprise, told Interfax-Military News Agency on Wednesday.
According to him, the Defence Ministry refused to participate in the promising project for there is not legal base to permit simultaneous development of the plane in the interests of the Defence Ministry of another country. The problem was discussed at the parliamentary hearings on Russian aviation development on Monday.
In accordance with the Russian-Indian agreement on development of the IL-214 multifunctional military transport plane dated June 5 this year, the joint programme takes five years up to first serial supplies of the plane. Particularly, the programme of research and tests envisages development, test batch production, their flight and certification tests and serial production mastering.
The plane is capable of airlifting some 100 people or 15t to 18t of cargo. Its take-off weight is 55t and range of operation up to 5,000km at the cruising speed of 850km/h. The plane costs some USD15m to 17m.
The IL-214 production programme is estimated at USD300m. According to Litvinov, the programme's financing was supposed to happen on the parity basis. So far all works on the plane production have been financed by the Ilyushin enterprise.
The Russian Defence Ministry is interested in the new type of plane capable to carry 15t to 20t of cargo but "in past few years the Air Forces leadership has been carried away with fighters and helicopters and completely forgot about military transport and long-range aviation," Livanov said. The same thing happens with special purpose aviation, particularly, with air scouts.
The ministry is quite inactive as far as extension of the IL-76 Candid plane's service life is concerned, Litvinov went on. The enterprise is not going to service terms of those planes "for eternity."
"The progress in the sphere of the IL-76MF plane is quite slow. There is no finance and we are doing all the job ourselves," Litvinov stressed.
According to specialists, the enterprise has invested over USD22m in the IL-76MF plane production programme.