Russia has decided to "revive" about 700 AN-2 aircraft, better known as "corncrakes." This was proposed by the Siberian Research Institute of Aviation to close the catastrophic gap in the country's small aviation. This is reported by UNN with reference to the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.
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This aircraft was designed back in the 1940s at the Antonov plant in Kyiv.
Over time, more than 17,000 machines were assembled in several countries, including Ukraine, Poland, and China. But most of these aircraft were long ago written off and destroyed.
In modern Russia, only 249 aircraft are actively used, and another 276 are on the balance sheet of DOSAAF (Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy), which has existed in the Russian Federation since the Soviet Union.
Since 2024, Russia has stopped writing off old machines and returned 16 units to the sky. However, the problem with engines stands in the way of the aircraft's "resuscitation."
American units are unavailable due to sanctions. The Russian TVD-10B exists on paper, and the prospects for its serial production in the conditions of technical and financial exhaustion of the industry are cautiously characterized by experts as "quite vague." It is worth noting separately: the initiators of the project claim that the fuselages of old machines are only one-third worn out, but industry experts do not believe this figure