At 35,000 Feet, a Russian Image Problem
MOSCOW — Airlines are a cautious lot, slow to trust a new airplane maker with multibillion-dollar orders and passenger lives. It took Embraer, a Brazilian maker of regional jets, two decades to become a major supplier to the industry.
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Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News
A Superjet on display at the Paris air show in June. Its manufacturer has had to overcome Russia's reputation in the aviation industry for poor air safety.
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So Sukhoi, a Russian company best known for making supersonic fighter jets, did not exactly get off to an auspicious start. When it delivered one of the first of its highly promoted new 100-seat Superjets to Aeroflot in June, a piece of safety equipment immediately broke down, prompting Sukhoi to ground the plane.
Although the plane was fixed and is flying again, the lapse shows just how difficult a path Sukhoi faces to persuade Western airlines to buy airplanes from a Russian state company. Russia’s aviation industry has long been plagued by safety problems, breakdowns and lethal crashes, rendering it virtually unable to sell planes outside the former Soviet Union, Iran, Cuba and parts of Africa.
“Historically, Russian aircraft have an image that will take a long time to address,” Les Weal, an analyst at Ascend, an aviation consultancy in London that advises the insurance industry on safety, said in a telephone interview.
“Superjet may be excited about their airplane,” he said. “But I’m not sure that will translate into a lot of orders from mainstream airlines. It would take a huge leap of faith for an airline to turn to a newcomer.”
But Sukhoi has high expectations for the Superjet 100, the first wholly new Russian civilian aircraft design since the breakup of the Soviet Union. The list price for the chubby, single-aisle aircraft is $31.7 million, about one-third cheaper than comparable short-hop jets from Embraer or Bombardier of Canada, Sukhoi says.
Gone is the grim upholstery and fluorescent lighting of the cramped, even scary, interiors of the Tupolev series of jets that are still operated by domestic Russian carriers. The Superjet’s cabin feels roomy, the overhead luggage bins can hold standard carry-on luggage and the lighting is soft. The high-bypass engines, a novelty for Russian passenger planes, hum rather than scream at take-off.
Sukhoi, which is in talks to sell the planes to the American carriers Delta Air Lines and SkyWest as well as to other Western airlines, hopes to sell 800 Superjets over the next 20 years. Besides two planes delivered to Aeroflot, Sukhoi has provided one to the Armenian national airline, Armavia. It has also agreed to provide 15 to Mexico’s second-largest airline, Interjet. Sukhoi has 176 Superjet orders in total.
Rather than emphasize the plane’s Siberian origins, with whatever associations with hardship or disaster that may evoke, Sukhoi has marketed it by pointing to its French and Italian partners, which worked in joint ventures to design the engines and provide the avionics.
“Yes, it is a Russian aircraft,” Olga Kayukova, a spokeswoman for Sukhoi’s parent company, United Aircraft Corporation, said in an interview. However, “it is made in cooperation with world-leading suppliers.”
Stephen McNamara, a spokesman for Ryanair, the low-cost Irish carrier, said his company would have no qualms about looking at a Russian plane so long as it met European Union safety standards. Most passengers, he said, don’t care what type of airplane they fly. “They know the airline, but not the airplane,” he said.
Ryanair has talked to Sukhoi about its new plane, he said, and the budget airline was more concerned that the plane was too small for its routes than about the reputation of Russian airplanes.
On the Superjet delivered to Aeroflot, a meter to detect leaks in the pipes that funnel fresh air, called bleed air, into the cabin had malfunctioned. The company said passengers were never at risk, as the actual air supply was not affected.
Sukhoi found a silver lining in the incident by explaining it had grounded the plane from an abundance of caution that in fact illustrated its new safety culture. The Superjet was the first Russian airplane with such a detector, which is standard on Western planes.
The planes also weigh two tons more than initial estimates presented to airlines, hurting fuel economy and making them less attractive. Sukhoi has said such deviations are typical for new aircraft.
Russian jets have had a rough spell recently, making the sales pitch even more difficult. In 2006, about 400 people died in Tupolev jet crashes in Russia and Ukraine. This June, a Tu-134 crashed while approaching a provincial airfield, killing most of the 52 people on board. (Tupolevs are made by another division of United Aircraft Corporation.)
International experts blamed the age of the planes for the accidents, but said cavalier attitudes about safety that pervade Russian industry also contributed.
A year ago, for example, the Russian television station NTV reported that 70 engineers at the plant making the Superjet had obtained fake engineering diplomas by bribing a local technical college; Sukhoi said those employees were not directly involved in assembling the planes.
Despite the high barrier to entry internationally for new passenger jets, Ms. Kayukova said airlines were eager for alternatives to Embraer and Bombardier for regional jets and even were searching for a third supplier for midrange jets like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320.
Ryanair this year announced negotiations to buy a planned Chinese competitor to the Boeing 737, called the C919, which is expected to be cheaper.
Ms. Kayukova said Russia would surely be able to compete with China on quality because China is not a traditional aerospace power. As if to emphasize this lineage, the Superjet being promoted at an air show in Moscow this month was named the Yuri Gagarin, after the Russian who was the first man in space.
By the late 1990s, Russia’s civilian aerospace industry had fallen on hard times. It had become clear that the nation’s wide-body and midrange jets had no market outside the former Soviet Union and a few one-time client states. The Ilyushin aircraft company, for example, sold only a dozen of its Il-96 flagship long-haul jets, including one with a convertible passenger or V.I.P. cabin that was sometimes used as the presidential jet for Fidel Castro.
Surrendering some pride, the Russian aviation industry took aim instead at Bombardier and Embraer, and formed joint ventures with Western companies to fill technological gaps.
Alenia Aeronautica, a division of the Italian engineering giant Finmeccanica, owns about 25 percent of the Superjet program and is helping to market the plane in Western Europe, North and South America, Japan and Australia through a subsidiary based in Venice, SuperJet International.
Sukhoi consulted with Boeing on after-sales service, and it installed avionics from the French company Thales.
The plane is certified to fly in former Soviet countries and is awaiting certification for the European Union. Sukhoi has said it will apply to the Federal Aviation Administration for certification only after it has a firm order from a United States customer.
“We will be facing the same problem as Japanese car manufacturers faced at the beginning,” Giacomo Perfetto, head of communications for SuperJet International, said in a telephone interview. “When they see the airplane fly, they will change their minds.”
