Russia Just Placed the Biggest Aircraft Order in Its History

Aeroflot Group signed a contract in Moscow on 18 September for 90 Yakovlev MC-21-310 narrowbodies, a deal described as the largest in the history of Russian civil aviation. The signing with the state industrial conglomerate Rostec was attended by President Vladimir Putin alongside the ministers of industry and trade and of transport, which tells you the order is as much industrial policy as fleet planning. Deliveries are scheduled to run from 2029 through 2032, and this is a second batch, following an earlier commitment for the same aircraft type.

The MC-21-310 is the domestically powered version of the aircraft, using Aviadvigatel PD-14 engines rather than the Pratt and Whitney geared turbofans originally planned. That substitution is the entire story of the programme. When Western sanctions cut off engines, avionics and composite materials after 2022, the MC-21 had to be redesigned around Russian-made substitutes, a process that pushed its service entry back by years and is the reason a contract signed in 2026 does not deliver anything until 2029. The aircraft competes, on paper, with the Airbus A320neo and Boeing 737 MAX families.

For Aeroflot the arithmetic is not optional. The group flies a large fleet of Airbus and Boeing narrowbodies that it can no longer buy parts for through normal channels, and which it has been maintaining through a mixture of cannibalisation and grey-market supply. Every year that passes makes that fleet harder to keep airworthy. Ninety domestically built replacements arriving between 2029 and 2032 is the plan for getting out from under that problem, assuming the production rate materialises, which is the part of the programme that has historically underdelivered.

What this means for travellers is limited but real. Foreign visitors flying inside Russia, and the sizeable transit market routing through Moscow between Europe and Asia on other carriers, are downstream of whether Aeroflot can keep a reliable domestic fleet flying. Russian airspace remains closed to most Western carriers and most Western carriers remain absent from Russia, so few readers will board an MC-21 soon. The order matters more as a marker of how thoroughly the global aircraft market has split into parallel systems that no longer buy from each other.

Sources: FlightGlobal, TASS