Recently, the news that three Chinese airlines purchased 292 A320NEO series passenger aircraft has flooded the screen. At the same time, according to TASS report, the wide-body passenger aircraft CR929 jointly developed by my country and Russia has regenerated variables. On June 29, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said at the "Future Engineers" forum: and China's The joint development project "has not developed in a direction suitable for us", and Russia is considering giving up the joint development of the CR929 wide-body passenger aircraft project with China.
Variables appear again?
Borisov also said: "As China has become an industrial giant, the Chinese people are becoming less and less interested in our services." In fact, it is indeed questionable how much role Russia can play in the CR929 project with its current aviation industry strength. From the beginning of the CR929 project, Russia wanted to develop it based on IL-96. In that case, it would be a modernized IL-96 at most, which is far from the goals and actual needs of the standard Boeing 787, so it is firmly opposed by China.
Russia always wants to develop
based on the IL-96. The current CR929 is a fully electric, fully composite wide-body passenger aircraft. The composite material content reaches 51%, and the proportion of aluminum alloy and aluminum-lithium alloy has dropped to 20%. , especially the composite wings, lift devices and avionics equipment will be produced in Russia. This is obviously unreasonable. Not to mention the level of Russian avionics equipment, it cannot even build autoclave . It has its own The only part of the passenger plane's wings that uses non-heat-pressed carbon fiber will be hard to blame if something goes wrong in the future.
CR929's composite body
In addition, the so-called CR929's plan to use the Russian PD-35 engine is not feasible, because Russia currently does not have a 350KV civilian turbofan engine, not even a 200KN one, An 225 and An 124 The D-18 installed is Ukrainian . The technical difficulty of Russia's leap to 350KN in one step is the same as ours. The progress of PD-35 and CJ2000AX is almost at the same pace, and there is no leading edge.
The progress of PD-35 is actually not much faster than that of CJ2000AX.
There are many differences between China and Russia on the CR929 project, such as the proportion of funds invested by both parties, the final market share distribution, etc., but the most important difference is still whether to " De-Europeanization”. As recently as June 7, Russian Minister of Trade and Industry Manturov stated that the CR929 jointly developed by China and Russia was being redesigned so that it would no longer rely on Western components. However, as a wide-body mainline passenger aircraft mainly for international routes, it is unrealistic to de-European and Americanize it. If we follow the Russian route, the final result will be the IL-96, which has gone around in a circle and then back again. .
CR929 front fuselage barrel section test piece
For the current Russia, even if it does not want to become European and American, there is no channel to introduce Western technology and parts, so they say "self-developed", but for us, If we do not seize the final hurdle of cooperation with the West, it will be invisible and give up the strategic opportunities that we have finally won. Of course, after adopting European and American technologies and components, we still need to increase the localization rate.
CR929 cockpit
From this, when we think of the cooperation in equipment development between China and Russia, there seems to be no successful case. The 38-ton heavy-duty helicopter that many people are thinking about has not had more new news since 2021, and neither has the two sides. There is controversy over whether to reduce the size of the Mi-26. It is estimated that in the future, it will still have to rely on itself and independently develop its own heavy-duty helicopters and deflection-wing helicopters.
The prospects for Sino-Russian heavy-duty helicopter cooperation are also unclear.
Finally, the question is, why is the equipment development cooperation between China and Russia always weak? The reason is still Russia's " double-headed eagle " attribute. Currently, it still focuses on looking west. Perhaps only when one day it truly wakes up and looks mainly east will it have sufficient strategic wisdom.
