Russian Ilyushin Il-96-400T To Be Developed In China

A few weeks ago the Russian-Chinese agreement of aeronautical development, particularly in the aviation segment of large passenger jet was ratified. It is well known that Beijing has a major weakness in that area and needs to enhance its industry to be able, by itself, to develop a long-range four-engine wide-body commercial passenger jet airliner.

The development memorandum signed between Chinese and Russian included a large passenger aircraft, no doubt, will be used by the military as a platform for multi-purpose .

Ilyushin Il-96-400T

The Russian Ilyushin Group will collaborate with the Chinese counterpart in the development of the Russian cargo plane Ilyushin Il-96-400T.

And the potentials are enormous based on this large platform. For example, the Chinese media is speculating on the possibility of modifying the Il-96-400T as the in-flight refuelling aircraft to replace the Ilyushin Il-78 fleet currently in service in PLAAF China.

A tanker version of Il-96-400T will match the capabilities of KC-46 that is based on the commercial Boeing 767 and that certainly would be of interest to the PLAAF and PLANAF.

The planned investment for the Russian-Chinese program "Il-96-400T" is 50 billion yuan (about 6,000 million Euros or about 8000 million $). The final investment estimate is around 100 billion yuan (about 12,000 million € or $ 16,000 million).

The Russian-Chinese Il-96-400T program is not the only one. It was also agreed to develop the Ilyushin Il-103 aircraft and it is expected to reach the production of 200 Il-103 per year. The investment in this program is 800 million yuan (about € 96 million or $ 130 million).

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