MOSCOW, March 3 (RIA Novosti) - U.S. aircraft major Boeing is looking to sell its next-generation 787 planes to two Russian airlines, a company official said Friday.
Craig Jones said the company was negotiating sales of 15 Boeing-787 Dreamliner planes to one airline and 2-3 planes to another, without disclosing their names.
Jones, Boeing's vice president for sales in the former Soviet Union, also said the U.S. giant was negotiating sales of next-generation planes in other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
The head of Boeing's Russian operations, Sergey Kravchenko, previously said the Boeing-787 was a wide body passenger plane that could carry 220-280 passengers up to 10,500 miles, and fly for 18 hours without refueling.
"We estimate the market potential for this airplane at about $400 billion over the next 20 years," Kravchenko said.
Boeing has a long business history in Russia and has invested more than U.S $1 billion in cooperative programs with the Russian aerospace industry over the last 10 years. Those include space research, aircraft design, information technology, and the development of transpolar routes.
The company has a Technical Research Center and a Design Center in Moscow, where Russian aerospace experts collaborate with their counterparts from the United States.
