MOSCOW. Dec 24 (Interfax-AVN) - The Russian Aviation and Space Agency thinks that Russian aircraft industry is ready to supply aircraft for domestic carriers.
"It is unfair to say that Russian aircraft industry is not ready to fulfil the tasks it is assigned," Valeri Voskoboinikov, the agency's first deputy CEO, said in an interview with the Rossiyskaya Biznes-Gazeta weekly, published Tuesday.
According to Voskoboinikov, the federal civil aviation development program up to 2010-2015 is going two ways: developing the TU-334 short-range airliner to be certified in late 2003, and upgrading the operational aircraft to meet ICAO requirements.
The production of aircraft in Russia has contracted in the last decade by factor of six to seven to the current level of five to 12 aircraft per year, Voskoboinikov said. Aircraft-making industry enterprises are engaged by 25 to 30 percent, and their service life depletion is above 60-70 percent.
Voskoboinikov said that only priority projects like TU-334 are being reliably funded, but the civil and military aircraft industries "are a single organism, and to say we can maintain military aircraft industry while dropping the civilian sector is a naive mistake."
There was a time when Russia accounted for 26 percent of world civil aircraft market, Voskoboinikov said.