The medium-range narrow-body aircraft Tu-204 became one of the passenger airliners that proved the possibility of safe landing with non-operating engines in practice. The airliner was originally planned as a promising platform with an open architecture, designed to replace the aging fleet of three-engine jet passenger aircraft Tu-154 for more than a decade.
The main problem of the "long-suffering" machine was that it was developed for too long, and the concept of a promising Soviet flagship for medium-haul airlines was radically changed several times.
Initially, this aircraft project was created with two engines in the tail section of the fuselage, and with two turbojet engines of the D-30KU line, which at that time were already in operation as part of the Tu-154 aircraft. However, already in the mid-70s, this was a completely different project with three engines - one in the keel and two under the wing.
The first prototype Tu-204 first took to the air on January 2, 1989. When the Tu-204 was ready for mass production, the USSR was already falling apart before our eyes. As a result, only 24 aircraft were transferred by the previously planned date, which, moreover, were inferior to the Boeing 757 in many characteristics.
Tu-214
To date, only 91 Tu-204s, including the Tu-204-200 modification, have been produced, of which only a few remain in operation.
In 2022, in the context of the Western sanctions policy in the field of the Russian aviation industry, the issue of the need to produce fully domestic aircraft became acute. And it is not surprising that the Kazan Tu-214 was one of the first on this list.
In February of this year, the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, Anton Alikhanov, stated that the first Tu-214s would begin to be delivered after the completion of certification and within the framework of the plans that were approved in the new edition of the KPTA, which was adjusted in 2024 based on the results of an audit of enterprises, that is, in 2025.
However, according to representatives of Russian airlines, the Tu-214 is not of interest to our air carriers today without a deep modernization due to its low commercial efficiency.
It only remains to hope that sooner or later the Kazan "Tushka" will still be modernized to the level of a modern airliner, and we will see the updated version of the Tu-214 in the livery of not only Russian airlines more than once.
Earlier, www1.ru reported that Russia in aviation will be able to do without its own developments: they did not copy, but made it better.
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