The Duma highlighted impressive efforts to lease planes of Russian design and manufacture. A federal target programme for the progress of civil aircraft industry in 2002-10 and up to 2015 also accounts for certain success-R&D has been made on pioneer aircraft, engines and gadgetry.
There are major problems, however. There are 5,717 aircraft on the unified national civil aviation register-but a mere 2,500 of these are in actual use, pointed out Andrei Yelistratov, aircraft service qualification board chief at the Federal Transport Monitoring Service.
The register has shrunken by 301 aircraft since 2002. A negligible seven planes from Russian-based plants that year were delivered to locally registered air-lines, fifteen a year later, and another seven this year, he complained.
If supplies go on at this snail's pace, Russia will never update its civil aviation. The task is all the harder with an utter lack of balance in Russian air industrial companies' finance policies, warned Mr. Yelistratov.
By this year's start, Russia had 215 civil airlines-55 of these government-owned. There were 423 airports, seventy of them international. Russia's thirty biggest airlines coped with 92.4 per cent of national total passenger flights from January through September last, as parliamentary statistics have it.
The proceedings point out a trend for Russian air companies' enlargement to concentrate passenger flights in the leading airlines.
