Ilyushin Il-86 Il-86

In October 1967 the Soviet government approved a Ministry of Civil Aviation specification for an «aerobus»: 350 seats and 3,600 km of range with a 40 t payload, or 5,800 km with seats filled and no freight, operating from smaller airports with 2,600 m runways. The difference from the West lay in the approach: where the West built more terminal capacity and stronger pavements, Soviet research institutes preferred to adapt the aircraft to existing airports. Hence the multi-wheel landing gear — a twin-wheel nose leg and three four-wheel bogie main legs — and above all the «luggage at hand» system: passengers boarded by the aircraft's own airstairs and deposited their suitcases in the lower-deck luggage stores.

Ilyushin began work on the aerobus in late 1969 by assessing derivatives of existing aircraft: an enlarged Il-62 (the Il-62-250, with 259 seats and a 6.8 m longer fuselage), double-deck versions, even a twin-fuselage arrangement, and a «civilianised» Il-76. From March 1970 the bureau moved to all-new designs under the Il-86 designation. The model shown to the Soviet leadership on 17 May 1971 still looked like an Il-62, with rear engines and a T-tail, the layout favoured by TsAGI. The final configuration — podded engines under the wing, like the 707 or the DC-8 — was doctrinally awkward: TsAGI officials had called the B-47 layout «utter nonsense». Ilyushin presented it as home-grown by pointing back to its experimental Il-22 bomber of 1946, and could finally show it publicly in 1973.

The programme's central problem was the powerplant, and it was never solved. By the late 1960s the US and the UK had turbofans with bypass ratios of 4 or 5 to 1; the first large Soviet turbofan, the Lotarev D-18T, did not appear until the mid-1980s. The Soloviev D-30 originally intended had a 2.4-to-1 ratio and failed to reach the required thrust, so on 26 March 1975 the Kuznetsov NK-8 was adopted, at only 1.15 to 1, noisy, thirsty and with no growth potential. That consumption is what cut the planned range: the Spanish Wikipedia explains the aircraft was conceived for 5,000 km and ended up at 3,600.

The prototype flew at Khodynka airfield on 22 December 1976. Ilyushin's own testing ended on 20 October 1978 — other sources say 22 September — certification flying by pilots independent of the bureau ended on 6 June 1977, and state acceptance trials ran from 24 April 1979 to 24 December 1980. Gosaviaregistr SSSR certified it under number 10-86. The inaugural Moscow-Tashkent service was flown on 26 December 1980, so the aircraft missed its stated target, the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

There was no prototype in the strict sense: the first two aircraft were handmade at the bureau's own facility in 1976 and 1977, one for flight testing and one for static ground testing; Factory 64 at Voronezh built the rest, with the Polish industry (PZL Mielec) manufacturing empennages, control surfaces, high-lift devices and pylons from May 1977, some 16% of the aircraft. Annual deliveries after certification were 1 in 1980, none in 1981, 11 in 1982, 12 in 1983, 8 in 1984, 9 in 1985, 11 in 1986, 10 in 1987, 10 in 1988, 9 in 1989, 11 in 1990 and 3 in 1991. Of the 106 examples built, one never flew — it was used for static tests — and three were exported: the type's only commercial sale, three aircraft for China Xinjiang Airlines in 1990. The factory closed in early 1992. The ban on noisier aircraft in the EU and the US from April 2002 pushed it off international routes, and in 2006 Aeroflot announced its withdrawal.

The only empty-weight figure located is the Spanish Wikipedia's 164,000 kg, hard to reconcile with the 208,000 kg maximum take-off weight the same source gives: it is recorded here and not loaded into the sheet pending material that confirms or corrects it.