The Ukrainian aircraft developer and manufacturers, and its Russian partner Ilyushin Finance Company (IFC) are looking at ways to involve Chinese, Indian and other foreign makers into production of An-148 family twinjets.

This information first surfaced during Airshow China 2010. Antonov general designer Dmitry Kiva confirmed that and said talks with interested companies in China “are going on”.

In his turn, IFC general director Aleksandr Roubtov also confirmed this information. He said that with 180 An-148 family aircraft having been placed with airline customers and potential buyers it is difficult to continue sales at high pace as free slots are now available only in 2016-2017 due to fairly slow production rates at the factories in Kiev and Voronezh. A “tiny” number of slots is kept for key Russian airlines such as GTK Rossiya and Aeroflot. Yet salesmen get increasingly concerned with early production slots availability as their shortage retards sales, IFC head grumbles. In order to boost production, Antonov and IFC are negotiating with foreign manufacturers on production of parts and components.

“It will be nice if we find good partners in China, India, Iran, and elsewhere in the developing world whose support and production capacities will help us boost production of the An-148 which is a very good and promising aircraft with its own market niche”, Rubtsov concluded.