Published: 4/24/1998

The Ulianovsk regional administration and the Volga-Dnepr air company have made a proposal to the Government and the Defense Ministry to establish a leasing company that would lease, to civil operators, the An-124 Ruslan airlifters which are being withdrawn from military service. The new drastic cuts in the Russian Air Force has led to the disbanding of several units of VTA, the Military Transport Aviation, including two An-124 regiments. One of these regiments is based near the city of Ulianovsk, the home ofVolga-Dnepr and the Aviastar production factory, the largest Ruslan user and its manufacturer, respectively. According to the appropriate order of the Defence Ministry, the regiment must be disbanded on 1 May. Its personnel should be released from military service and the aircraft handed over to other military units. The Ulianovsk regional administration and Volga-Dnepr are offering a plan where the assents of the regiment would be given to a newly-established leasing company, tasked with the conversion of the redundant military airlifters into civil freighters, using special documentation prepared by the Antonov design bureau. Simultaneously, the regiment's flight crews and ground personnel would be employed to operate the converted An-124s. Funds for conversion programmes would be drawn from commercial banks under guarantees from the Ulianovsk regional administration. This offer was made as an alternative to exchanging the redundant An-124s for Tu-160 bombers, which are kept in storage at Priluki air base in the Ukraine. "It would be foolish for Russia to exchange aircraft able to generate a profit for something unable to do so", Aleksei Isaikin, general director of Volga-Dnepr, told ConCISe. Isaikin added that each of the seven An-124-100s in the Volga-Dnepr inventory annually attarcts revenue in excess of $10m. According to Isaikin, the legal basis for establishing the proposed leasing company for operations with redundant military hardware, exists in the form of orders issued earlier by the Defence Ministry, but still never used in practice. Some VTA units already have the permission of the Defence Ministry and the Federal Aviation Service of the Russian Federation for commercial operations. The biggest is the 224th Flight Detachment, whose freighters were responsible for 9% of all cargo traffic in Russia in 1997. Isaikin said that these units do not pose a threat to civil operators in economical terms, but admitted that they give a poor image of Russian cargo operators ito foreigners. "I mean the situation when a military-registered aircraft with 'Aeroflot' signs on its sides arrives with a commercial cargo in a foreign airport and the crews awkwardly try to hide their (military) shoulder-straps", he explained. In this plea to the Government and the Parliament, the Ulianovsk regional administration says that if the idea of the leasing company does not materialise, it will be impossible to find jobs for the servicemen being made redundant. Another argument is that all An-124s of the Ulianovsk Regiment are not flight-worthy and need big money for restoration, which the Ministry of Defence does not have. (VK) (DF498.1)

Article ID: 149