Il-96-300

[TeddyRuxpin]

I suppse this a bit of double-question thread, but has anyone either piloted or been a passenger on the Il-96-300? What are your thoughts on it?

Also, how come it is so unpopular among western carriers - reliability? Availability of parts?

Soz if a stupid question!

Rgds.

[BSmuppet]

It looks to much like an A340. And no one likes the French.

[philbky]

Ignore the muppet - rumour has it he's the personification of a certain virus that was due to be released on April 1 and has afflicted Pprune.

The IL-96 has never attained sales success for a number reasons. Ilyushin, like other Soviet era design bureaus, had a great deal of financial and production problems to overcome after the end of the Soviet Union.

Then the break up of Aeroflot left a massive surplus of passenger aircraft available to the raft of airlines that were spawned - many rather tatty but cheap.

Aeroflot, in its much reduced form, went for 767s and 777s and the other major players really wanted western equipment.

That killed the home market. The old Warsaw Pact airlines all went to Airbus and Boeing and, even if Ilyushin had had the money to build in reasonable quantities, the lack of experience of Russian types in many markets was against them and, in the markets that may have been interested - Iran, parts of Africa, Cuba and S America, the reliability of previously operated Russian transports had not been exactly high so there has been only a tiny number taken up.

As it stands, it seems the aircraft itself performs rather well.

[Seloco]

Slight thread drift I'm afraid but I did have the chance once to crawl over an early Aeroflot IL86 at LHR back in the late '80s. Two things struck me about it at the time:

one entered it via a door at baggage hold level (a la VC25A) and could load one's own bags there before going up a staircase to the main deck. I can't help thinking that MO'L would approve of this feature!
the interior was decorated with a huge amount of wooden trim - stair handrails, overhead locker and partition edgings and so on - that must have added significant weight but certainly differentiated it from its plastic western counterparts.

[WHBM]

Same as for other ex-Soviet types, they are just too non-standard, notwithstanding that they may actually be good, well designed aircraft. This means there are no parts holdings round the world, no sims anywhere for the crews to use outside the one in Moscow, etc. There's even a lack of documentation and manuals in languages other than Russian, which few overseas engineers speak. It becomes just too difficult to run a non-standard type. Even Aeroflot let go for nternational operations once they were able to get access to Boeing and Airbus.

In the old Soviet days, the fleet was flown overseas with a substantial set of spares in the hold and a flight engineer (sometimes two) who could do the stuff with them. Nowadays that is all seen as unnecessary cost.

Aeroflot and others can continue to operate them within Russia for the opposite reasons, that as the types are still common there they can get spares, appropriately licenced engineers, etc, at their various points.

It's something that Airbus realised when they started out in the 1970s, that support round the place was key to getting acceptance, and it is a huge long-term punt. It's notable that the early Airbus sales that got them going were in places which already had contacts with Toulouse, and support arrangements in place for the old Aerospatiale Caravelle, and those could be carried forward, plus they used a lot of standard western products on the aircraft anyway, and engines from mainstream western rather than unknown Soviet manufacturers. It would be a lot harder nowadays. Bombardier's RJ did it on the back of their existing arrangements for business jets, and Embraer's equivalent from their various prop types which had sold well.