Renovated Il-76 enters series production

Russia continues work to develop a new heavy transport aircraft. In early October, the first production Ilyushin Il-76MD-90A airframe completed its maiden flight at the Ulyanovsk-based Aviastar-SP factory, a subsidiary of the United Aircraft Cor­poration (UAC). This profoundly modernized version of the Il-76MD baseline features greater payload capacity, longer range and reduced fuel burn.

The Il-76MD-90A program, launched in 2007, called for production of the upgraded transports to be organized in Russia. Prior to that, the Il-76 family had been built at the Tashkent TAPOiCh factory in Uzbe­kis­tan.

The upgraded Il-76 became the first Russian freighter to get a new Kotlin-Novator glass cockpit. All information related to the performance of the aircraft’s systems and equipment is fed to LCD displays at the pilots’ workstations. The new avionics suite made it possible to reduce the crew headcount from five to three.

The Il-76MD-90A has a reinforced wing and upgraded landing gear, and is fitted with new, more powerful PS-90A-76 engines in lieu of the original D-30KPs. The new wing is made from long components, which reduces the wing weight by 2 t and prolongs the fuselage life by 15%. Thanks to these improvements, the new aircraft can carry 60 t of payload, or 10 t more than the baseline. Its range was increased by 27% to 5,000 km, and fuel burn reduced by 18%.