Aeroflot Orders New SUPERJETS, Rosavia on Hold, MiGs for Sale $5

Three aircraft are undergoing testing, and 13 more are in various stages of completion, Khristenko said. Twenty Superjets will be produced in 2010, and by 2013 Sukhoi hopes to produce as many as 70 per year.

Sukhoi currently has orders for 122 Superjets.

Steady demand for Russian civilian aircraft can save the industry, Khristenko said, expressing hope that planned airline Rosavia, a joint venture between Russian Technologies and the Moscow government, will become a significant partner for the local industry.

UAC’s highly awaited candidate for the mid-range segment, the MS-21, will likely be available only in 2020. Russia has no projects for a long-range aircraft, Khristenko said.

Rosavia was planned to have be a Russian state-owned airline, formed from several airlines bankrupted by high oil prices and the global financial crises. It was to have been Russia’s largest airline with a fleet of more than 100 airliners...

With passenger numbers in Russia falling 20% a month, the federal government on 5 March, 2009, put the airline’s creation on ice for at least a year because of the economic climate. It would be cheaper to start a new airline than to inherit collapsed carriers’ debts – and many regional airlines would not last the year, the state-funded Russia Today TV quoted a bank analyst as saying.

Nizhny Novgorod region prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the sale of four MiG-31 supersonic long-range fighter jets to a shell company for $5 apiece, the Prosecutor General’s Office said Thursday in a statement on its web site.

The MiGs — which had been stored at the Nizhny Novgorod’s Sokol aviation plant that produces them — were sold without engines and weapon systems, but even in such a condition they’re each worth at least 116 million rubles ($3.7 million), the statement said.

...Detectives also said they could not establish the identities of the officials involved in the scheme. Investigators were not able to determine the whereabouts of the MiGs, prosecutors said.