Russia will develop its own wide-body aircraft - Rostec head

SAMARA. Sept 8 (Interfax) - Russia plans to develop its own wide-body aircraft, as plans for the joint production of such an aircraft with China have not yet materialized, the head of Rostec Sergei Chemezov said.

"For now, they [China] have decided to make it themselves. And we will try to make our own. Once we make the PD-35 engine, we will build our own wide-body aircraft," Chemezov told journalists in Samara.

Russia and China previously discussed the joint creation of a Russian-Chinese wide-body passenger aircraft CR929. In 2014 Russia and China signed a cooperation agreement, an a little later the China-Russia Commercial Aircraft International Corporation (CRAIC) was established and became project operator. Commercial deliveries were scheduled to begin after 2025, but first the Covid pandemic forced the partners to review the deadlines and move the start of deliveries to 2028-2029, and then anti-Russian sanctions promoted them to change the format of cooperation from joint production to customer-contractor.

"We have revised the format [of involvement in the project], corresponding changes in interstate documents should be made in terms of changing approaches. In other words, along the same lines as the helicopter, there is a customer and a contractor. Those competencies that are required from the Russian side, we are willing to join with these competencies in this project based on a contract of executors," Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov told reporters in May 2024.