The first flight took place today to Sochi from Zhukovo Airport in Moscow, and from next week the plane will begin flying from the Second Domodedovo Airport in Moscow to Yerevan, Batumi and Tel Aviv.
Yekaterina Rushlova, Red Wings' deputy general director for fleet management, called the plane a “good, reliable machine.” Among its features, it mentioned a new single-class cabin with 194 seats and twice the capacity of the Superjet 100, the company's flagship aircraft.
Flights will be resumed on the Tu-214 (Tu-214 is a copy of the Tu-204) RA-64518, which Red Wings received in December 2023. The aircraft was manufactured in 2009 and was operated by Transaero until its disappearance. Airline. It went bankrupt in 2017. In 2023, after the Russian government's decision, Ilyushin Finance, which owns the plane, began restoring its airworthiness. The Red Wings, like IFC, are part of state-owned Rostek.
Roman Gusarov, an aviation expert and editor-in-chief of Avia.ru, told Agenstwo that he saw the plane as it was being transferred to Red Wings. According to the expert, the cabin of this plane is not much different from that of Boeing and Airbus: “A large, comfortable and modern plane.” However, they are more expensive for airlines to operate than Boeing or Airbus: they consume more fuel and require three crew members in the cockpit (two pilots and a flight engineer).
According to Gusarov, “the airline must have four crews per aircraft.” — If a company takes one plane, it must employ not eight pilots, but 12. All this is the cost of transportation, Gusarov explains.
In 2018, Red Wings was the last Russian airline to stop flying the Tu-214. Russian media, citing sources in the Ministry of Transport, described the plane's return to passenger flights as unlikely. At the time, specialists complained about the plane's shortcomings: its high fuel consumption, difficulty in maintaining it, and a large number of unusual malfunctions that made maintaining the plane more expensive.
After the outbreak of war in 2012, there was talk in Russia about resuming the use of Tu-214 passenger aircraft. The plane, less efficient than its Western counterparts, has once again become the focus of attention of Russian airlines, which have faced strict operating restrictions on Boeing and Airbus aircraft due to the sanctions.
The Russian authorities decided to restore the airworthiness of old aircraft and also start serial production of new aircraft: in the program for the development of the aviation industry, the Russian government plans to produce 70 Tu-214 aircraft by 2030. The first new aircraft were scheduled to be delivered to airlines already in 2023 , but the start of deliveries has been postponed to 2024.
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