The Challenge of Raising the Capacity of Russia’s Military Transport Aviation

Abstract

Russia’s fleet of military transport aircraft is steadily ageing and probably now diminishing in scale. Efforts to develop new aircraft and put them into regular production in acceptable volumes have been met with endless problems, exacerbated in 2014 and again more recently by sanctions imposed on Russia following its military actions against Ukraine. Julian Cooper uses case studies to explore the development of transport aircraft in recent years and seeks to establish why the modernisation of this important dimension of the country’s military capability has met with such limited success.◼