MOSCOW_Russia's aviation industry is unable to meet the growing domestic demand for new passenger planes, and the carriers will have to import Western-made airliners, officials said Thursday.
The statements during parliamentary hearings were in stark contrast with President Vladimir Putin's pledges to revive the nation's aviation industry.
Russian airlines need to replace their aging Soviet-built Tupolev and Ilyushin airliners quickly, but the nation's once-mighty aviation enterprises, weakened by a post-Soviet economic meltdown, cannot produce enough aircraft, industry officials said during hearings in the Russian parliament.
"The deficit of planes is growing," said Oleg Krasnykh, a senior official with the state-controlled United Aircraft Corporation. He said the corporation, a newly created holding uniting all the top aircraft-makers, cannot fully satisfy the airlines' demand for new planes.
Krasnykh and several other officials and industry experts urged the government to lift import tariffs on foreign planes and aircraft components to encourage their import.
The comments seemed to contradict an ambitious proposal Putin made last month to streamline the aviation industry and increase aircraft production. Official plans set the goal of building 5,800 new civilian and military planes by 2025 and winning 15 percent of the world market.
But officials who spoke at the parliamentary hearings indicated that the obsolete manufacturing base and an exodus of qualified personnel make it difficult to increase aircraft production significantly.
Russia has commissioned only a few dozen aircraft for its own military and civilian airlines since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and the aviation industries have survived mostly thanks to lucrative export orders for their fighter jets from China, India and other foreign customers.
But Russian-made airliners have been unable to compete on the global market, and even Russian carriers have increasingly opted for Boeings and Airbuses. Only a few Il-96 and Tu-204 airliners have been built since the Soviet collapse.
Russia's oil-driven economic boom, meanwhile, has increased the number of air passengers by some 20 percent annually in recent years. Western-made planes already carry nearly half of all passengers, according to Oleg Smirnov, who heads the nonprofit Partner of Civil Aviation Foundation.
He said that the government's failure to facilitate imports of Western airliners would weaken Russian airlines and allow Western carriers to sweep Russia's market.
Participants in the parliamentary hearings also urged the Kremlin to create a single state agency in charge of aviation. Russia's civil aviation is currently overseen by five state agencies with parallel duties and vague responsibilities.
Some of these structures both regulate the industry and investigate accidents; blame is invariably pinned on the crew rather than regulatory failures.
"The existence of the five agencies means the lack of responsibility," said Valery Okulov, head of the nation's flag carrier, Aeroflot.
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, 500 "babyflots" - offshoots of the Aeroflot monopoly - sprang up. Today there are 182, and the smaller ones are more likely to sacrifice safety to cut costs, critics say.
Industry experts and pilots say that lax state controls and carriers' run for profits was a major factor behind a string of recent crashes of Russian airliners.
"When a transport minister chairs a panel investigating a crash, he investigates his own action," Smirnov said.
