Why Russia Needs the An-124 Before the IL-100 Is Ready

[00:00:00]25 years rotting in a field. No engines, just rust, snow, and silence [music] at a forgotten Russian airbase. Then, in 2024, something unexpected happened. The aircraft was pulled out of storage, not to be scrapped, but to be rebuilt and returned to service.

[00:00:18]That would make sense if Russia already had its next generation heavy airlifter.

[00:00:23]It doesn't. The aircraft meant to replace the An-124, the Il-100, has been talked about for decades. Yet, it still hasn't left the drawing board, which leaves Russia relying on a Cold War giant that was never supposed to fly this long. But, is that the whole story of why Russia still needs the An-124 before the Il-100 is ready? And what does that reveal about the real state of Russia's aerospace industry? Let's find out why this one plane matters so much. Okay, quick backup. Why does one dusty old cargo plane matter this much? The An-124 is basically Russia's only real way to move things too big for anything else in the fleet. We're talking main battle tanks, helicopters, entire turbines. Picture trying to fit a delivery truck through your apartment door. That's the kind of problem this aircraft was built to solve, just at military scale, with a nose that literally swings open to load cargo straight in.

[00:01:24]Compare that to the Il-76, Russia's other big workhorse.

[00:01:28]Even the modernized version, the MD-90A, tops out somewhere around 40 to 60 tons of cargo.

[00:01:35]Sounds like a lot, until you realize the An-124 was built to move loads the Il-76 physically can't fit inside its hold, let alone lift. One is a delivery van, the other is the only truck in the country that can carry a house. It flies on four giant turbofan engines, but here's the brutal catch. Those engines are built in Ukraine by a company called Ivchenko-Progress.

[00:02:02]And when relations between Moscow and Kyiv collapsed after 2014, Russia didn't just lose spare parts. It lost the legal design rights, too. The actual blueprints needed to build more of these engines at all. So, ask yourself, what do you do when the one plane you can't replace runs on an engine you're no longer legally allowed to make?

[00:02:24]This isn't some hypothetical worry, either.

[00:02:27]It's already happened once.

[00:02:29]Back in 2015, when Russia moved into Syria, the An-124 quietly became the backbone of the entire operation, hauling armored vehicles and heavy equipment into Khmeimim airbase flight after flight for years. Without it, that campaign would have looked completely different. So, when the war in Ukraine started draining Russia's transport fleet years later, there was no mystery about which aircraft would get the emergency call again. So, how bad is it, really?

[00:02:59]Worldwide, there are only around 25 An-124s left in any kind of active condition. Russia itself operates somewhere between 10 and 13 of those day-to-day. The rest are in storage or stuck with Ukrainian operators Russia can't touch anymore.

[00:03:16]Then the war made it worse.

[00:03:19]In 2023, a drone strike hit a Russian airbase at Pskov, reportedly destroying several Il-76 transports, smaller cousins of the An-124 built for similar jobs. Just like that, part of an already thin fleet was gone. And yet, between early 2022 and September 2023, Russian transport aviation still flew roughly 8,000 sorties, moving around 132,000 tons of cargo, and nearly 376,000 troops. So, picture that math for a second. Demand climbing and the number of working aircraft shrinking at the same time.

[00:03:58]What would you do in that position?

[00:04:00]By the way, if you're enjoying this kind of deep dive aviation analysis, consider subscribing to Civil Avia.

[00:04:08]Every day, we go beyond the headlines to explain the technology, the strategy, and the global competition shaping the future of flight. Now, here's where things get even more interesting.

[00:04:20]>> [music] >> Russia's solution right now, Russia's actual answer, stretch, don't replace.

[00:04:25]It's called the An-124-100M modernization program. Strip these aging airframes down, rebuild the avionics, reinforce the structure, and stretch their usable life out toward 50 or 60 years total.

[00:04:40]For a design from the 1980s, that's like telling a 40-year-old car it's got another four decades ahead, as long as you keep rebuilding it piece by piece.

[00:04:50]And that dusty aircraft from Seshcha airbase, the one we opened with, that's this exact program in its rawest form.

[00:04:58]Russian media reported it was towed to the Aviastar repair facility in Ulyanovsk in March 2024, the very same plant that's supposed to eventually build its replacement.

[00:05:10]That's not a backup plan.

[00:05:12]Stretching a 1990s airframe to 2040 is the plan.

[00:05:16]So, if the real strategy is just keep the old ones alive, where's the new plane that's supposed to make all this unnecessary?

[00:05:24]This is where the story gets almost funny, if it wasn't so telling.

[00:05:29]The Il-100 project, the replacement project, goes back to the early 1990s.

[00:05:34]First called the Il-106, then the PAK VTA. Now, it's the Il-100, nicknamed Slan, Russian for elephant, fitting for for this heavy and this slow to move.

[00:05:48]Late in 2025, a regional governor in Ulyanovsk announced, almost proudly, that production plans were finally moving forward. But Ukrainian defense analysts looked at that same announcement and basically laughed. As of that moment, the Il-100 exists as, quote, preliminary sketches, no metal cut, no prototype anywhere near a runway. Officials once promised a first flight around 2024 to 2026, with real service by 2027 to 2030.

[00:06:20]Every one of those dates has already slipped.

[00:06:24]At this point, the honest guess [music] isn't the late 2020s anymore, it's sometime in the 2030s, and that's assuming nothing else goes wrong.

[00:06:33]Its sister project, the Il-276, is even worse off. In development since 2001.

[00:06:40]24 years, with India walking away from the partnership back in 2015. Still not built. So, who finally admitted the real timeline out loud? Not a Western analyst, >> [music] >> Russia's own former deputy prime minister, the man literally in charge of weapons programs. He said research on this whole aircraft family wouldn't properly start before 2025.

[00:07:03]The new engine meant to power it, >> [music] >> the PD-35, not ready before 2027 at the earliest.

[00:07:11]And almost as an aside, he mentioned that the old modernized An-124s could keep flying until nearly 2040. Sit with that for a second. The backup plan has a firmer deadline than the actual plan.

[00:07:24]Okay, so here's the question that should actually be bothering you by now. If this replacement is this far behind, why doesn't Russia just throw everything at it and get it done faster?

[00:07:35]Because building a brand new heavy transport aircraft from a blank sheet of paper is a completely different animal from patching up an old one.

[00:07:44]Think about what actually goes into it.

[00:07:46]New engines designed and mass-produced entirely in-house, new composite materials since Western suppliers are now off-limits under sanctions, new avionics, new hydraulic systems, new everything built without the foreign components Russian industry leaned on for decades.

[00:08:04]That's not a program you rush. That's a program you're lucky to finish at all.

[00:08:10]Meanwhile, the An-124 already exists.

[00:08:13]The factories that maintain it already exist. The airframe is a known quantity, one Russian engineers have understood inside and out for 40 years.

[00:08:23]Stretching its life another two decades is, frankly, the safer bet both in cost and in risk compared to gambling everything on an unproven aircraft that doesn't even have a prototype yet. So, this isn't really a story about incompetence. It's a story about a calculated trade-off, one that quietly reveals just how much ground Russia's aerospace industry actually lost when it got cut off from the West.

[00:08:49]So, here's the balanced take because this story cuts both ways.

[00:08:54]Credit where it's due. Keeping a 25-year-old airframe airworthy and stretching its life toward 50 or 60 years is a genuinely impressive feat.

[00:09:04]It says something real about Russian maintenance crews that this aircraft can fly at all. But that same fact is also a quiet confession.

[00:09:14]When your safest bet in 2024 is reviving something built in the 1990s rather than finishing a new design, your replacement program isn't just behind schedule.

[00:09:24]It barely exists yet.

[00:09:26]So, let's bring this all the way back to where we started.

[00:09:30]Russia needs the An-124 before the Il-100 is ready for one simple reason.

[00:09:36]There is no before.

[00:09:38]Not yet.

[00:09:39]Not for years.

[00:09:41]The elephant on the drawing board still hasn't taken its first steps.

[00:09:45]While the old Condor, patched, modernized, and pulled out of a field after 25 years, keeps doing the only job Russia has left for it.

[00:09:54]Until that changes, the newest thing about Russia's heaviest airlifter isn't the aircraft. It's the paint.

[00:10:02]So, here's what I want to know. Do you think Russia actually gets a working Il-100 into the skies before its last airworthy and 124 finally gives out for good? Drop a yes if you think they pull it off. Drop a no if you think this elephant stays a sketch on paper for another decade.

[00:10:21]I'll be reading the comments, so make [music] your case down there.

[00:10:25]If you want to see this same engine bottleneck playing out on the passenger side of Russian aviation, check out our breakdown on the MC-21.

[00:10:33]The link's right there on screen. See you in the next one.