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Russia's Irkut Corp. has shown, in its Irkutsk factory, the first completed MC-21 jetliner. It may be built in versions that carry about 130 to 211 passengers.
The company hopes to commence flight testing by the end of the year. As shown, the aircraft had a pair of Pratt & Whitney PurePower PW1400G-JM geared turbofan engines, but when manufacturing begins in earnest, it may be equipped with the Russian-built Aviadvigatel PD-14, which is still in testing.
The aircraft is scheduled to mark its first flight in 2017 and is planned be handed over to its first customers in 2019-20.
The МС-21 family includes two aircraft with a high degree of design commonality. МС-21-200 designed for 132 to 165 passengers and МС-21-300 designed for 163 to 211 passengers.
Coverage:
- Business Insider
- TASS (owned by Russian government)
- Air Transport World
- Aviation International News
- Sputnik News (sponsored by Russian government; has video)
- Defenseworld.net (Tor-friendly copy)
- ChannelNewsAsia
- Pravda.ru
(Score: 4, Informative) by subs on Friday June 10 2016, @01:32AM
It's not really novel in concept, geared turbofans have been around for a while now [wikipedia.org], as have large, high-power turboprops [wikipedia.org] (the effective thrust output of a Kuznetsov NK-12 is roughly equivalent to a 50-60 kN jet engine). The real innovation is the power scale. The NK-12, when it came out, was considered a marvel of gearbox engineering and until the new breed of geared turbofans have sprung up, the most powerful geared turbine engine ever flown in service. The new breed of geared turbofans coming along now provide the equivalent of 2-3x more power through that gearbox than the NK-12 did. That's the real deal.