After witnessing the rollout of Russia's MC-21 airliner at a glitzy ceremony in Irkutsk in June 2016, aviation expert Steve Trimble had little hesitation in picking the jet as the world's most underrated aircraft program.
The Siberian-made plane was set to feature a tightly pressurized cabin for a pleasant passenger experience, advanced pilot controls for increased safety, and long, lightweight wings made with a cutting-edge manufacturing process.
The MC-21, named as an abbreviation of Mainline Aircraft of the 21st Century, was intended to replace the aging Tupolev Tu-154 and compete with Europe's Airbus A320 and America's Boeing 737. Several countries reportedly expressed interest in the new Russian plane after the 2016 unveiling.
A decade later, Trimble says most features that gave the MC-21 the potential to shake up the global aviation industry have been jettisoned as the Yakovlev Corporation's aircraft finally nears production through geopolitical turbulence that has thrown the project off course.
"Sanctions have deprived the MC-21 of most of the key technologies I mentioned [in a 2017 interview]," Trimble, the defense editor for Aviation Week, told RFE/RL. Several cutting-edge components "have all been scratched and replaced with far inferior Russian alternatives," he added.
President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly railed against delays in Russia developing its own passenger fleet, but industry insiders say the MC-21 program has had its wings clipped by management of the country more than managers on the factory floor.
Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, sanctions severed Russia's aviation industry from Western supply chains. That added urgency to the Kremlin's ambitions for its own airliner fleets but imploded existing projects built around Western-engineered parts, including the MC-21.
"Russia was forced to replace foreign engines, avionics, and numerous other systems in an aircraft that had already been designed and was approaching production," Andrei Menshenin, a Budapest-based flight operations officer, told RFE/RL. "In practice this means redesigning parts of the aircraft, integrating new components, and repeating a significant amount of testing and certification work."
Among several other workarounds, Yakovlev had to source Russian-made composite material for the MC-21's wings and ditch American-made Pratt & Whitney engines.
"Weight creep" of the redesigned aircraft added a reported 6 tonnes to the airframe. That extra heft, and other compromises, cut the aircraft's range from 5,100 kilometers to just 3,830 -- far below its Airbus and Boeing counterparts and an awkward shortfall in a country as large as Russia where many intercity connections would require refueling stops for the MC-21.
But with Russian airlines currently relying on hundreds of officially unsupported Boeing and Airbus planes which are effectively operating on borrowed time, the Kremlin apparently sees no choice but to keep prodding their own manufacturers to produce all-Russian planes.
An update to the MC-21 that would shorten the plane's fuselage and reduce passenger capacity to boost range was recently announced. But even with such a drastic trade-off, Putin appeared to be personally unhappy with its specifications.
During a visit to the Yakovlev plant to see MC-21s being manufactured in July, Putin reacted sharply to being told the truncated version of the plane would have an estimated range of 5,000 kilometers.
"It should be more, it should clearly be more," he insisted to company managers.
Pressure from the Kremlin on its aviation chiefs is coming amid chronic workforce issues as the military lures skilled industrial workers into its war effort.
Russian airlines have pledged to purchase hundreds of MC-21, led by the mostly state-owned Aeroflot, which announced in 2022 that it wanted more than 200 of the planes by 2030.
But industry insiders say the MC-21 in its current form will be largely a monument to what could have been if cooperation between Russian aerospace designers and Western suppliers had not been shut down.
"The all-Russian version [of the MC-21] will be difficult to sell to airlines outside of countries politically aligned with Russia," David Kaminski-Morrow, the air transport editor at Flightglobal, told RFE/RL, "especially since most of those countries will still have access to Airbus and Boeing models or, in the case of China, the Chinese-built C919."
With Western aviation giants having a "stranglehold" on the medium-range passenger plane niche, Kaminski-Morrow added, it would be a giant leap of faith for foreign buyers to commit to a novel jet with industry-lagging specifications and an untested maintenance network.
"The market is almost certainly going to be confined to Russia," he predicted.
