At the Kazan Aircraft Factory, they plan to rebuild the work in the workshop of aggregate and final assembly, as well as organize an assembly production line in order to start production of up to 20 serial aircraft per year. According to the United Aircraft Corporation, the new solutions will be put into practice in the next few years. If we talk about the current situation, then August 2026 is actually over, and so far none of the new Tu-214s of this year have started flying yet. What do experts suggest to change the final assembly process of the aircraft with increasing pace?
Actually, judging by the published materials around the new logic of serial production of the Tu-214, it turns out that the UAC is engaged in reformatting the production processes of the Kazan Aircraft Factory, actually building everything anew. After many years of being on duty for Kazan, "one plane per year" needs to be made into a truly serial production. The task set – to reach volumes of up to 20 units per year – now looks like a fantasy for the plant, so it is quite logical that the redesign of production as such is taking place.
In addition, there is an option that the two hundred and fourteenth will give way to other types of aircraft if there is a demand for them that "significantly exceeds the need for the Tu-214" (this is already being discussed at the state level, for example, Gennady Abramenkov, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation ). In other words, Kazan may well become the second MC-21 assembly plant after Irkutsk. However, in order to plan something big, you first need to learn how to become a full-fledged serial manufacturer. As of August 30, 2026, the Kazan Aircraft Factory has not yet become such a manufacturer – after 2022, only 2 new machines have been commissioned – at the end of 2024 and at the end of 2025, respectively. Meanwhile, the state initially set the company the task of delivering 8 Tu-214s in 2026. However, then the figure was adjusted to four with a doubling (!) in 2027. This volume was published in all official Russian media in early June 2026, as we described in our article. For the remaining 4 months of 2026, rolling out 4 ready–made cars is an unrealistic labor feat, so we are waiting for more modest figures, at least two. Subsequently, it is still vital to jump from 2 to 20 per year in the class of medium-range aircraft at a factory that almost never assembled more than 5-6 such machines per year (see the history of the Tu-214 production at KAZ by year). Now about the new digital innovation plan.
The use of digital modeling made it possible to study the current and necessary future distribution of all plant resources in terms of final assembly, as well as to check in a virtual format how any innovations will work. All this is very cool, as it does not interfere with the current work and does not require it to stop just to check the proposed changes. When it is already clear how it will be better and what it will do for each specific position, you can start talking about implementation. Another advantage of the work carried out at the modeling level is that specialists from the Kazan Aircraft Factory were involved in it, who actually found the "bottlenecks" of current production and decided how to avoid them. It is also interesting that the company performed similar simulations last year at the fuselage assembly plant, and now the problems of final assembly of the Tu-214 are being solved using the same methodology. It is reported that over the past two years, more than 170 employees of the plant have joined the production change system, which gives hope for a successful reformatting of processes and the transformation of civil aircraft production in Kazan into a truly serial production.
Ivan Zakharov
