Even a technically successful launch of the PD-8 does not yet guarantee trouble-free operation. For civil aviation, it is important not only to create an engine but also to build a system that can quickly find, eliminate, and prevent the recurrence of malfunctions, Andrey Patrakov, founder of the flight safety service RunAvia and former employee of Safran, told "Pervy Tekhnichesky".
The expert believes that operational support has become one of the weak points of Russian civil aviation.
Unfortunately, we have little experience with this systemic work. And here I see more risks associated with this.
He cited the Superjet story as an example. Individual defects could recur for years because systemic work to eliminate them was not organized at the necessary level. As a result, the problem of the new aircraft turned into not only an engineering but also an operational one.
The target indicators for the new PD-8 engine were initially set higher than those for the French-Russian SaM146 power plant, Oleg Panteleev explained.