The Voronezh aircraft plant (VASO) in its current condition is not capable of serially producing airliners of the Il-96 series because of outdated production technologies. Aviation expert and editor-in-chief of the portal Avia.ru Roman Gusarov told First Technical about the enterprise's problems.
According to him, all documentation for the airliners at VASO is currently in paper form and has not been digitized. Another important factor is the large amount of manual labor.
The Il-96 physically cannot become a mass product. Airlines will come and put money on the table. Do you think there will be an aircraft in two years? I highly doubt it. Because, excuse me, specialists are leaving, competencies are being lost. If a plant produces nothing, everything degrades.
Gusarov explained that problems can arise even with small parts that simply are no longer produced by anyone.
One thing is an established assembly line, and another is when bolts of a certain specification are needed. They will rush to look for them, and the factory that used to make them has closed. It is the same as saying: let's produce old vacuum picture tubes for televisions? But there are no factories that make tubes and the picture tubes themselves. This is an extremely complex task that cannot be implemented in any way.
Gusarov concluded that the Il-96 can be produced, but only when its prospects become clear.
The head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Voronezh Region, Sergey Khlyzov, had stated the absence of orders for Il-96 series aircraft. In his opinion, Russian airlines decided to wait for an opportunity to buy Boeing.
For now, the key recipient of wide-body aircraft, namely the Il-96-300 version, remains the Rossiya special flight detachment.