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Russia needs to import Western airliners to meet rising demand for air travel, officials say
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 13 - 03 - 2008


Russia's aviation industry is unable to meet
the growing domestic demand for new passenger planes, and
the carriers will have to import Western-made airliners,
officials said Thursday, according to AP.
The statements during parliamentary hearings were in stark
contrast with President Vladimir Putin's pledges to revive
the nation's aviation industry.
Russian airlines need to replace their aging Soviet-built
Tupolev and Ilyushin airliners quickly, but the nation's
once-mighty aviation enterprises, weakened by a post-Soviet
economic meltdown, cannot produce enough aircraft, industry
officials said during hearings in the Russian parliament.
«The deficit of planes is growing,» said Oleg Krasnykh,
a senior official with the state-controlled United Aircraft
Corporation. He said the corporation, a newly created
holding uniting all the top aircraft-makers, cannot fully
satisfy the airlines' demand for new planes.
Krasnykh and several other officials and industry experts
urged the government to lift import tariffs on foreign
planes and aircraft components to encourage their import.
The comments seemed to contradict an ambitious proposal
Putin made last month to streamline the aviation industry
and increase aircraft production. Official plans set the
goal of building 5,800 new civilian and military planes by
2025 and winning 15 percent of the world market.
But officials who spoke at the parliamentary hearings
indicated that the obsolete manufacturing base and an
exodus of qualified personnel make it difficult to increase
aircraft production significantly.
Russia has commissioned only a few dozen aircraft for its
own military and civilian airlines since the 1991 collapse
of the Soviet Union, and the aviation industries have
survived mostly thanks to lucrative export orders for their
fighter jets from China, India and other foreign customers.
But Russian-made airliners have been unable to compete on
the global market, and even Russian carriers have
increasingly opted for Boeings and Airbuses. Only a few
Il-96 and Tu-204 airliners have been built since the Soviet
collapse.
Russia's oil-driven economic boom, meanwhile, has
increased the number of air passengers by some 20 percent
annually in recent years. Western-made planes already carry
nearly half of all passengers, according to Oleg Smirnov,
who heads the nonprofit Partner of Civil Aviation
Foundation.
He said that the government's failure to facilitate
imports of Western airliners would weaken Russian airlines
and allow Western carriers to sweep Russia's market.
Participants in the parliamentary hearings also urged the
Kremlin to create a single state agency in charge of
aviation. Russia's civil aviation is currently overseen by
five state agencies with parallel duties and vague
responsibilities.
Some of these structures both regulate the industry and
investigate accidents; blame is invariably pinned on the
crew rather than regulatory failures.
«The existence of the five agencies means the lack of
responsibility,» said Valery Okulov, head of the nation's
flag carrier, Aeroflot.
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, 500 «babyflots» _
offshoots of the Aeroflot monopoly _ sprang up. Today there
are 182, and the smaller ones are more likely to sacrifice
safety to cut costs, critics say.
Industry experts and pilots say that lax state controls
and carriers' run for profits was a major factor behind a
string of recent crashes of Russian airliners.
«When a transport minister chairs a panel investigating a
crash, he investigates his own action,» Smirnov said.


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