Russia's Air-Show Blues

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 23, 2001 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

The Cold War is over, and Russian Arms salesmen are just now waking up to smell the coffee. Insight reports on proliferation of modern weapons from the Paris Air Show.

Come on, general. Let's go!" His burly forearms bronzed from the sun, steely-gray chest hair bristling through his half-open shirt, "the general" slumped contentedly on the sofa, gazing at a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label on the coffee table in front of him. It had been a hard day at the Paris Air Show for the Russian arms salesman, and only two fingers of Scotch whisky were left. Ten minutes later, the general and his friend staggered out toward the bus, weaving in and out of the chauffeur-driven minivans and executive golf carts ferrying prosperous aerospace executives along the chalet line at Le Bourget Airport. This reporter waved to them, but they no longer remembered me. Arm in arm, all sheets to the wind, they swayed back and forth like a pair of Volga boatmen.

You can spot the penniless at the Paris Air Show by inspecting their trash, or more precisely the absence of it. At the chalets of the prosperous, where large business deals are inked, empty cases of champagne block the stairs to the kitchens. But at the Russian chalets-there have been no empty cases and no cause for celebration. The Russian aerospace industry has the blues.

Gennadi Arkhipov fondly remembers his days as a test engineer for Soviet strategic bombers. "During the Cold War, we used to fly out over the Arctic Circle until we were met by U.S. fighters. Their pilots always gave us the thumbs up! The truth was, we were all airmen, and no one wanted to fight." Today, Arkhipov is deputy director general of MiG Aircraft, the recently formed conglomerate that brings together the fabled Mikoyan design bureau and the various production facilities that formerly were managed by the Soviet state.

Yes, Arkhipov says, MiG is working on a fifth-generation combat jet, just like everyone else. But he had no announcements to make, no contract awards, no gee-whiz details of spectacular new technology -- the standard for Paris Air Show talk. MiG's biggest new project is the MiG AT (for "advanced technology"), a jet trainer it is developing jointly with the. French for the export market, where it will compete with a half-dozen similar aircraft for a dwindling client base. Its chances of becoming a commercial success won't be helped by the fact that France also has a stake in a competing project being developed by the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. (EADS), a newly formed megaconglomerate that has big support from the European Union.

MiG inherited a massive Cold War industrial base that was designed to churn out large numbers of relatively low-tech aircraft on the orders of the Soviet state. With the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the conventional Soviet military, even those orders have vanished. The Russian Federation isn't buying many MiGs, nor is it subsidizing once-massive export sales to former client states such as Libya, Syria, North Korea and Iraq. Also over is the more recent era when a complacent U.S. government, eager to wean Russia from its Cold War habits, allowed MiG to dip into the rice bowl of Western firms by selling aircraft in traditionally Western markets such as Malaysia, which purchased a handful of MiG-29s in 1994.

"Since President [George W.] Bush was elected," says Arkhipov, "we are seeing a stronger U.S. presence in markets around the world." That competition is making it harder every day to feed MiG's 60,000 workers.

"We are in discussion with the Russian government on a restructuring plan," Arkhipov tells Insight. "We will downsize some production lines and shut down others." While the defense industries of both the United States and Europe just now are emerging from 10 years of mergers and downsizing following the end of the Cold War and are beginning to increase sales, Russia clearly has a long way to go.

Russia makes some money these days by flying "Red Team" MiGs against U.S. fighter pilots at the Navy's Top Gun school and by maintaining and modernizing Cold War aircraft in former Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland, Hungary and East Germany that now belong to NATO. Some 1,600 MiG-29s were produced -- half of them sold to foreign customers. But even here MiG is facing tough competition from Western aerospace manufacturers offering their own upgrade packages. It is increasingly facing competition from Israel, which is famous for improving even the most modern fighters it receives from the United States with combat-proven radar and other avionics gear designed by Israeli companies.

Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) unveiled its first marketable upgrade of a Soviet-era fighter jet -- a Romanian MiG-21 -- at the 1993 Paris Air Show, and Since then has developed improvements for the MiG-23, the MiG-29 and Mil combat helicopters. In their latest and only slightly provocative development, this year the Israelis gave flight demonstrations of a specially modified Su-25 "Frogfoot," a fearsome tank-killer and ground-attack plane in service with some of the world's unfriendliest nations. During the 1980s, the Iraqis used the Frogfoot to hunt Kurds in the northern mountains, and the Russians themselves deployed it against Afghan mujahideen and more recently against Chechen separatists. Besides its maneuverability and large weapons load, the Frogfoot is the only aircraft in the world that boasts a fully armored cockpit and armor protection of all vital systems, including the engine and fuel tanks. This feature comes in handy during low-level bombing runs against feisty guerrilla fighters equipped with large-caliber machine guns or small rockets.