One of the eternal themes of modern Russia is talk about the revival of small aircraft and the creation of a new light regional aircraft. The story took another turn on Sunday, August 25, 2019, when RIA Novosti, citing the press service of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, reported that a new regional aircraft would be created in the country, designed to carry 9-14 people. Actually, the fact that a replacement is being prepared for the famous "Kukuruznik" An-2 is not news for the past several decades, only the dates of launching into production and the name of potential replacement aircraft are changing.
Light multipurpose aircraft An-2
In the meantime, the long-lived An-2 aircraft remains the main workhorse of domestic small aviation, which first took to the skies back in 1947. Serial production of this aircraft was completely completed in the USSR in 1971, while under license the aircraft continued to be assembled in Poland and China. Despite its more than venerable age, according to the FSUE "SibNIA named after S. A. Chaplygin", by mid-2017, about 90 percent of all small aviation tasks in the Russian Federation are still performed by the An-2 light multipurpose aircraft, which are popularly nicknamed "Annushka" and "Corn".
The replacement of the An-2 will be determined in September 2019
The decision on what kind of light aircraft will eventually replace the old An-2, the specialists of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia plan to take already in September 2019, as the press service of the Ministry reported the other day. For development work on the creation of a new light-engine aircraft, 1.25 billion rubles were allocated from the budget. At the same time, it is already known that when creating a new aircraft, developments, technical solutions and all the groundwork obtained during the creation of the TVS-2DTS "Baikal" aircraft will be used. For a long time, aviation specialists of SibNIA from Novosibirsk were engaged in the development of this prototype with a wide use of composite materials in the structure.
At the same time, it was previously announced several times that this particular model of the aircraft - TVS-2DTS, would go into serial production, however, the launch dates for the series were postponed several times. So, back in April 2018, the official website of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia reported that serial production of the new TVS-2DTS aircraft, created by specialists from the Siberian Research Institute of Aviation, would begin in Ulan-Ude on the basis of a local aviation plant, which is part of the Helicopters Russia . It was planned to start serial production of a new light aircraft for small aircraft in 2021, and the first operator of the new aircraft was to be Polar Airlines from Yakutia.
Now, in the best case, the start of serial production of the new aircraft is shifted to the end of 2022. This deadline was set by the Russian Deputy Prime Minister and Presidential Plenipotentiary in the Far Eastern Federal District Yuri Trutnev, who visited an aircraft plant in Ulan-Ude in July 2019. According to a high-ranking official, the end of 2022 is the deadline set by the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade and the aircraft plant.
Light multipurpose aircraft TVS-2DTS
If back in April 2018 in the Ministry of Industry and Trade they said that it was the TVS-2DTS aircraft that would go into serial production, then in August 2019 it became known that the decision on the fate of this aircraft and what technological features of this project would be used in the creation of a new machine is not yet accepted. Rossiyskaya Gazeta was told by the Ministry of Industry and Trade that TVS-2DTS is an experimental model of an aircraft, which was created to test new technologies in practice. Taking into account the technical groundwork obtained under this project, a new production aircraft is being created within the framework of the LMS program (light multi-purpose aircraft).
So far, the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia is looking for an R&D contractor to create a replacement for the outdated An-2 multipurpose aircraft. The contractor is expected to submit a general view of the new aircraft, as well as a set of conceptual design documentation by December 2019. By September next year, a set of design documentation for a prototype of a new light multipurpose aircraft should be ready, and the prototype of the aircraft itself is planned to be assembled by the end of 2020.
Why TVS-2DTS turned from serial to experimental
The aircraft, which in recent years was presented as a potential production model to replace the An-2 and actively participated in various exhibitions and air shows, suddenly turned into an experimental aircraft. It's no secret that the decisions of the Russian government can be extremely difficult to understand and, it seems, this is exactly the case. The plane, which they wanted to serially assemble in Ulan-Ude, suddenly ceased to satisfy the state with something. Why there was another shift in the timing of the series launch and a new R&D contract with a total value of more than a billion rubles appeared, we can only speculate.
It is only known for certain that TVS-2DTS surpassed the legendary Kukuruznik in its flight performance. So, the cruising speed of the car increased to 330 km / h, the ferry range up to 4500 km, and the carrying capacity up to 3.5 tons. The features of the Novosibirsk aircraft included a new wing, a "glass" cockpit and a new fuselage. The highlight of the aircraft was to be the widespread use of composite materials. And the use of modern avionics made it possible to operate the aircraft at any time of the day and made it all-weather.
Light multipurpose aircraft TVS-2DTS
True, the story with the "Superjet" is repeated here, when the plane is Russian only on paper. In fact, the heart of TVS-2DTS was supposed to be the American Honeywell TPE331-12UAN multi-fuel turboprop engine, developing power up to 1100 hp. and allowing the plane to fly on both kerosene and motor gasoline. The five-bladed propeller and a set of aviation equipment were also developed by the Americans, the propeller was manufactured by Hartzell Propeller Inc, and the avionics company was Garmin. Composite materials should be mentioned separately, the new aircraft was planned to be made of one-piece composite. And here again it is not a fact that it was a question of the Russian composite. As the Far Eastern edition of RBC wrote back in 2018, the creators of the aircraft refused to use the Russian composite due to its high cost.
In recent Russian history, such a production organization scheme did not take off on the example of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft, from 55 to 80 percent of the filling of which in different years were foreign components. Such a scheme for a small aircraft is fraught with even greater problems with the supply of spare parts, repair and maintenance, as well as the choice of the repair plants themselves. Separately, we can note the story with the Russian medium-haul liner MS-21, the main feature of which was to be a composite wing. At the same time, the start of the serial production of the airliner was postponed for at least a year due to the refusal of the United States to supply composite materials, the fault was the American sanctions. Initially, the manufacturer relied on American and Japanese composite materials from Hexcel and Toray Industries, respectively.
Perhaps the TVS-2DTS project faced the same problem as its older brother. At the same time, the aircraft initially did not fit well into the import substitution policy declared by the Russian government. Probably, it was the large share of foreign components and materials, as well as the increasing cost of the aircraft, that caused the Ministry of Industry and Trade to initiate a new stage of R&D to create a light multipurpose aircraft. Most likely, the novelty will be distinguished by a large volume of domestic components and assemblies.
Russia just needs small aircraft
For a country like Russia, small aircraft is vital, this is understandable to any person who studied geography at school. The size of the country initially contributed to the development of air traffic. Many regions of Russia are larger in size than individual countries of the world, for example, the not largest Udmurtia is 1.5 times larger than Belgium and slightly larger than Holland in area, and the neighboring Kirov region in area is already three times larger than the homeland of the Kalashnikov assault rifle. Needless to say, both of these subjects of the federation today simply do not have small aircraft. A resident of the Soviet Union could easily afford a flight from Samara to Saratov, having covered about 440 km by air. Today, in order to fly from a million-plus city to a city with a population of almost 850 thousand people, it is necessary to make a flight with a transfer in Moscow with a total duration of 11 hours, is it not a miracle. Nowadays, it is commonplace for a country in which out of 1400 small aircraft airfields there are only 200 left, and not all of these two hundred are actively exploited.
At least in some form, small aircraft have survived in the Far North, Siberia and the Far East of the country, where they often remain the only means of delivering passengers and cargo to remote settlements. Specialists of the Ministry of Industry and Trade note that more than 28 thousand settlements of Russia today do not have ground communication, that is, they are cut off from the "mainland", and in 15 Russian regions small aircraft is the main component of the transport system. That is why the aircraft, which should come to replace the An-2, is of such great importance.
Today, the brainchild of the Antonov Design Bureau, created in the late 1940s, remains the main workhorse of small aircraft, but the number of operated "Corners" in Russia is only slightly more than 200 units, all these aircraft need to be changed. In an interview with the newspaper "Vzglyad", the columnist for the magazine "Arsenal of the Fatherland" and aviation expert Dmitry Drozdenko noted that in Yakutia, whose territory is larger than India, the authorities sounded the alarm last year. Today in this region, which is highly dependent on small aircraft, 80 percent of the fleet is aircraft in their 30s. According to the expert, by 2026 the fleet of local aviation, represented by An-24, An-2 and Mi-8 helicopters, will have to be completely written off.
Attempts to create a new aircraft for small aircraft in Russia or launch foreign analogs into mass production have already been made many times. Only since 2008 in Russia have been discussed the projects of the Rysachok aircraft of the Technoavia company, the Expedition of the private company MVEN from Kazan, as well as options for the serial assembly in Russia of the Canadian Twin Otter and the American Cessna. All these projects ended in nothing. Separately, we can highlight the localization of production in Russia of the regional twin-engine Czech aircraft L-410 for 19 passengers, which nevertheless began to be assembled piece by piece in Yekaterinburg in 2018 on the basis of the Ural Civil Aviation Plant.
L-410 assembled at the Ural Civil Aviation Plant
The main problem that prevents Russia from developing small aircraft and finally creating a new aircraft for it, most experts consider the low paying capacity of the country's residents. The population, which should be the main consumer of this service, has a weak purchasing power. The small aircraft market collapsed. Today, local airlines account for only three percent of Russian passenger traffic. It turns out to be a vicious circle when airlines do not need to purchase aircraft for such flights, and the Russian aviation industry does not need to produce them, there is no demand - there is no supply. The country has not been able to get out of this trap since 1991. And if the Russian industry will someday be able to cope with the technical side of the problem and create a new small aircraft, then how to make the prices of air tickets affordable for the broad masses of the population in conditions when the real incomes of citizens have been declining for five years in a row is still a mystery. …
