China to Buy Five Planes From Russia

The Wall Street Journal ^

[madrussian]

China has said it will buy five Russian civilian aircraft, a deal that will help add an economic component to the growing political rapport between Moscow and Beijing.

China has been a major customer for Russian military aircraft and other hardware, but hasn't made a significant purchase of civilian planes since the fall of the Soviet Union. The order for five Tupolev-204 freighter aircraft isn't big enough to pose a serious, immediate threat to either Co. of the U.S. or Airbus of Europe, which together make the majority of the world's commercial jets. But the deal could be significant for Russia, which has been struggling to revive its moribund civilian-aircraft industry and regain a toehold in the world market.

[madrussian]

China to Buy Five Planes From Russia

[Voronin]

Russian-made jetliners in the past have been notoriously unreliable and inefficient, making it hard to find buyers on the world market.

Efficiency didn't matter in the Soviet Union and regarding realiability, very few Russian airliners have crashed, let alone Soviet. Russian planes aren't built like western planes so they tougher and fly in weather that no Western airline would fly in. Their pilots also train much longer. It's like comparing chalk and cheese. In the West, the emphasis was on efficency(cost) and saftey - Russia has always sided on safety and robustness, efficiency being secondary (though also due not having some of the Western expertise).

VRN

[madrussian]

That was a purely marketing statement, as far as "notoriously unreliable" statement is concerned. As for efficiency, the problem was with inefficient engines, but even then the difference in fuel consumption was probably of the order 10%-20%.

[Voronin]

True, but it should be noted that GE is already working with Perm(?) on their engines and that the French (SNECMA/CFM) also are looking in to this. It is entirely of course in self interest as Russia wants to buy only Russian if possible. Russian aerospace has always mixed high-tech with inefficient low-tech in interests of saftey.

What springs to mind is when Viktor Belenko defected with his Mig-25 to Japan. The US discovered that the radar used old fashion vacuum tube techonolgy that the US had long since abandoned for purely electronics. The advantage for the Russian plane was that the radar was immensly powerful and could 'burn thorough' heavy jamming to guide its missiles to the target.

It also reminds me of a story I read when after Gemany's invasion of Russia, the german army gave Hitler a tour of a captured T-34 tank, which had dozens of hit marks from german tanks, but practically no damamge (ran out of fuel/ track damage?). Hitler looked it over and his only comment was 'it's not built very well'.

VRN