The Rise and Fall of the Superjet

Not orders from superiors, but the combined knowledge of people create technological breakthroughs in the modern world

Once upon a time, when meaningful discussions were still possible on television, I led a debate on the economy on one of the channels with a well-known publicist who was a theater director in the past. This publicist perceived the whole world as a theater, people as actors, and the economy, politics and even war as an entertaining game for the audience. The main thing that resented him in the modern Russian economy was its inability to produce. Where are our passenger planes? Where are our cars? Why in the USSR they could produce absolutely everything, but now they can’t? Why won't the state give the order?

Today, this elderly publicist is already out of fashion. The last time, I remember, I saw him when he, sitting on a soft sofa, explained to the Donbass separatists how to fight properly. But the state took some of his "useful advice." We have our own passenger aircraft, competing with Boeings and Airbuses, the Sukhoi Superjet.

However, the point, of course, is not the advice. The views of this publicist are so popular and so widespread among people of completely different political views that it would be strange if the state did not take up their practical implementation.

After all, it seems to many that if a country is small, it can produce few goods, and if it is as big as Russia, then it will do absolutely everything.

There are a lot of people, a lot of land, natural resources, and a market too. So what are the difficulties? Forward! Get to work!

I once or twice had a chance to fly the Superjet. I confess that I really liked it. The salon is comfortable, the chairs are cozy, the flight attendants are beautiful, the service is good ... Stop-stop - any reader will be indignant at this point - what do the flight attendants and service have to do with it? After all, it depends on the carrier company, and not on the design of the aircraft. Flight attendants are not produced at the aircraft factory, like the components of the Superjet.

That's right, the flight attendants have absolutely nothing to do with it. But if you look at the problem from a professional, and not a philistine point of view, it must be admitted that almost everything visible to the naked eye of a passenger has nothing to do with it either. An airplane, just like a car, a smartphone, a high-speed train, diagnostic equipment or highly effective medicines, is the result of the work of thousands of narrow specialists responsible for specific details. Not only a layman looking from the outside, but even a businessman who takes up production cannot imagine the full complexity of the product.

Whether it is possible to collect thousands of necessary components in order to make a quality product depends not on the size of the country and population, but on market relations. That is, on whether the company will be able to hire scientists and engineers capable of working at the world level, and also on whether it will be possible to purchase from related firms (foreign, in particular) those components that cannot be manufactured by ourselves.

Modern production is not the execution of the order of the President of the country, but a long-term process of cooperation of a large number of people and companies, which requires a lot of money and outstanding managerial skills. Moreover, the process is almost unpredictable. Many difficulties are revealed only along the way, so even the leaders of modern business never fully guarantee success in a new difficult undertaking.

In the course of the operation of the Superjet, many technical problems were revealed, as well as difficulties associated with servicing the aircraft, which neither presidents nor publicists who talk about import substitution and the need to match our status as a great power in the economy can imagine. And then, finally, on May 5, a tragedy occurred at Sheremetyevo due to the fact that the Superjet devices were powerless before a lightning strike.

I, just like presidents and publicists, do not have sufficient knowledge to explain everything and dot the “and”. Perhaps the "Superjet" will still overcome difficulties and will exist on the market without the forced importation of the aircraft to domestic companies by order of the authorities.

Or maybe the tragedy at Sheremetyevo means that the project is finally covered.

This story teaches us that the world (including the economic one) is much more complex than even the most qualified expert can imagine. And pernicious arrogance (in the words of the Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek) is the idea that we can solve the tasks that the authorities set, based on our own ambitions. Not orders from above, but the combined knowledge of many people create technical breakthroughs in the modern world. And whether this cumulative knowledge will be combined to solve an important problem depends, among other things, on the authorities. But not from his orders, but from the ability to create such rules of the game (scientifically - institutions), under which cooperation is mutually beneficial.