Tu-154 will perform its last regular flight on Wednesday

On October 28, the Tu-154 aircraft will perform its last regular flight - the last aircraft of the Alrosa airline remaining in civil aviation will fly from Mirny to Novosibirsk, writes the industry publication Frequent Flyers.

The aircraft with tail number RA-85757, which will perform tomorrow's final flight, is over 20 years old. It was built in 1992 and has flown in Iran and Belarus, and more recently from Mirny (Yakutia), where Alrosa is based, to Siberian Irkutsk and Novosibirsk.

After the Tu-154 has completed its last civilian flight, aircraft of this type will remain only with various government organizations: the special flight squad "Russia", the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, the Ministry of Defense.

Tu-154 made its first flight in 1968. Its mass production began in 1970, a total of 1026 cars were produced. The aircraft formed the basis of the fleet of medium-haul aircraft of the Soviet Aeroflot and Russian airlines in the 1990s. It is considered one of the world's fastest mass-produced passenger liners, with a cruising speed of over 900 km/h.

Since the late 2000s, Russian airlines have begun a gradual decommissioning of the Tu-154. The main reason was the low fuel efficiency of the engines: the fuel consumption of the Tu-154 is almost 1.4 times higher than that of modern Western aircraft. In 2008, S7 Airlines decommissioned all of its Tu-154s, and Rossiya and Aeroflot followed suit in 2009. Soviet aircraft replaced their Western counterparts - Boeing 737 and Airbus A320.

The Russian replacement for the Tu-154 was to be the new medium-haul aircraft MS-21, the design of which began in the mid-2000s. According to the original plan, its mass production was supposed to begin in 2016, but at first this period was postponed due to the usual delays for such a project, and then due to sanctions: the United Aircraft Corporation lost the opportunity to purchase imported composite materials, and instead of American Pratt & Whitney engines, it was decided to use Russian PD-14s, which have not yet been certified in Europe. Now mass production of the MS-21 is scheduled to begin in 2021.