Today, the Soviet passenger airliner Il-96, which was developed by the Ilyushin Design Bureau in the late 1980s, is still widely used in Russia. Despite its many advantages, the time of this machine has already passed. Fortunately, very soon the old Soviet aircraft should be replaced by an updated Russian-made giant liner - the promising wide-body Il-96-400M.
The development of a new wide-body passenger airliner began in Russia in the camps of the Aviation Complex. S. V. Ilyushin in 2017. The new aircraft will become a further logical development of the passenger aircraft model that is used by Russia today. Needless to say, the design of the Il-96, which appeared in the 1980s, is already quite outdated, despite several upgrades carried over over the years.
The new 496 will be significantly larger than its predecessor. The fuselage length will increase from 55.3 to 63.9 meters. In the tail, the plane reaches from 15.7 to 17.5 meters. The payload will increase by 18 tons, from 40 to 58. At the same time, the maximum take-off weight of the aircraft will grow from 250 tons to 270 tons, respectively. At the same time, the flight range will be reduced by 2 thousand kilometers from 8.4 thousand km to 6.4 thousand km. The cruising speed of the liner will also slightly decrease, now it will be Mach 0.78 instead of Mach 0.8 (Mach 1 - 1,225 km / h). The liner will be driven by PS-90A1 engines, which will be installed on it in an amount of four instead of PS-90A. In the future, a transition to two new generation power units is also expected.
As for the interior arrangement, at the moment the project provides for three options for the layout of the passenger liner. They differ primarily in the number of passenger seats. Previously, the Il-96 was also produced in three versions: 350, 370 and 400 seats. The new aircraft will accommodate 305, 350 and 402 passengers. The most important point is that the new aircraft retains high capacity indicators and at the same time beats foreign counterparts in price, which makes the Il-496 a very competitive aircraft on the market.
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