MAKS air show presents best of world aviation
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Xinhua, August 17, 2011
The 10th Moscow International Air Show (MAKS) opened Tuesday, with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev saying it would boost the country's aerospace industry.
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Planes on display of the 10th Russia National Aerospace Exhibition in Moscow |
MAKS 2011, at Zhukovsky airfield outside Moscow, has attracted more than 800 companies and organizations from 40 countries with some 200 aircraft.
According to the MAKS website, more than 100 Russian, French, Italian, Ukrainian and U.S. airplanes will offer at least 10 hours of aerobatic displays in six days.
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He said it would "once again present the best products of domestic and foreign design bureaus to the professional community and numerous visitors."
"Hopefully, the vast business program of the show will spur on the exchange of advanced experience, broaden international cooperation and promote domestic high-tech products on external markets," the president was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying.
One of the biggest highlights of the show is the debut of the first T-50 stealth fighters - the fifth-generation fighter that is viewed as a rival to the U.S. F-22 Raptor.
The T-50 is a multipurpose frontline fighter designed by Sukhoi bureau and built in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Russian Far East. The plane made its maiden test flight in January 2010.
Russian Air Force Commander Alexander Zelin told reporters at the opening of the show the air force would be equipped with trial samples of the fighter in 2013, and they would enter active service in 2014-2015.
Konstantin Makienko, an expert in the Moscow's Center for Strategy and Technology, told Xinhua: "Besides Russian Air Forces, the T-50 is a hot buy for all the countries which use SU-27 fighters, with India in the first place."
Makienko said he expected no contracts for the fighter to be inked at the show but clients were already lining up.
Boris Rybak, CEO of the Infomost aviation consulting company, told Xinhua that MAKS was always a powerful marketing tool, and deals worth more than 20 billion U.S. dollars were expected this year.
Rybak said the commercial aviation sector at the show had been even more impressive than the military one.
"New military aircraft like T-50 are on the relatively early stage of designing, while the civilian planes, like Boeing's jumbo-jet DreamLiner, the Airbus' A380 or the Sukhoi's SuperJet, have already been available in the market," he said.
The state-owned United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) projected Tuesday that it would sell some 100 of Sukhoi's SuperJets and MS-21 passenger jets during the show.
Transaero, one of Russia's leading airlines, said it had signed a memorandum with the European Airbus on the sidelines of the show to buy eight A320 passenger jets.
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