Moscow. 08 June 2021. On June 8, 2016, at the Irkutsk Aviation Plant, a branch of the Irkut Corporation, a solemn ceremony of rolling out the first flight copy of the new MS-21 passenger aircraft, one of the key projects in civil aviation in new Russia, took place. The liner concentrated the latest technologies of modern world aircraft construction, including those that have not yet been used by anyone in the production of narrow-body medium-haul airliners.
The roll-out ceremony took place in a hangar specially prepared for this purpose, where more than 700 guests and participants of the program gathered. The aircraft shown at the ceremony was a basic modification of the MS-21-300 with a capacity of 163 to 211 passengers. The solemn moment was preceded by years of hard work of thousands of people: specialists from the Engineering Center named after V.I. A.S. Yakovlev, which ensures the development of MS-21 and coordinates all scientific and industrial cooperation, which included the leading scientific institutes of Russia, centers of competence created within the framework of the UAC, engineering companies that create fundamentally new developments for the MS-21 program. In a single information space with the Engineering Center, specialists from the Irkut Corporation branches in Ulyanovsk and Voronezh were developing the design and systems of the MC-21 aircraft.
Roll-out is an important milestone in the history of the creation of each new aircraft. It can be compared to the birth: behind many years of “nurturing” the project, from the inception of the idea itself to the development of design documentation and the creation of the first prototype flight model. The very solemn ceremony of the first appearance of a new aircraft to the public is always a show that equally excites its creators and invited guests, and the entire world aviation community. The mystery of “birth” is whether the new aircraft will live up to the hopes and expectations of its developers? Will it correspond to the characteristics declared in the project? The developers have set themselves a very ambitious task: to create an aircraft that is the best in its class. One of the main competitive advantages of the MS-21 in comparison with its counterparts from Boeing and Airbus was a fully composite wing with a record aspect ratio of 11.5, which made it possible to increase the aerodynamic quality and, as a result, increase the efficiency of the aircraft. Nobody else in the world has done this in serial models of this dimension.
Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev once formulated the essence of aircraft design in a succinct and succinct manner: “If it is not beautiful, it will not fly.” The MC-21-300 aircraft revealed to the public during the rollout was fantastically beautiful! Later, his first flights convincingly proved that the design decisions laid down were correct.
MAKS-2021 will feature four experimental aircraft of the MS-21 family. We are looking forward to the main premiere of the salon, when the MS-21-310 with the Russian PD-14 engine rises into the sky over Zhukovsky.
