Civil aviation in Russia has to start replenishing its aircraft fleets as soon as possible. If this isn't done, within five years the industry will face a severe shortage of modern aircraft able to meet requirements for safety and dependability. The first signs of the approaching chaos in air travel are already beginning to appear, in the form of a chain of airline catastrophes involving Russian airlines flying jets of both domestic and foreign manufacture. This is all happening in a country with a strong history of safe air travel.

Russians should be able to fly on dependable, modern aircraft without worrying about their personal safety. The best way to ensure this is self-evident: Russia needs to produce a sufficient number of domestic airliners to replace aging existing craft. Even though those who favor the import of used foreign equipment of questionable quality try to argue otherwise, Russian aircraft companies are equipped for the serial production of modern airliners that would assure the internal air market of safe new aircraft that can be operated economically.

The sole obstacle on the road to meeting these needs is the absence of a basis for the effective financing of aircraft production. The industry will soon present the government with proposals that would lead to a significant increase in the production of existing models of Russian jets with the help of federally guaranteed loans. If these financing mechanisms are put in place over the short term, the financing for mass orders of aircraft can be found.

That the government has turned its attention to difficulties in the domestic aircraft industry is cause for optimism. This includes the strategic decision to create a holding company, the United Aircraft Building Company, to unite all of the country's civil producers and construction bureaus. The legal basis for this unification will be completed as soon as September or October, but this will only be the first step in the development of the company. Russia can't afford to lose valuable time, so strategic decisions have to be made now. If it misses the opportunity to promote the mass production of Russian aircraft and continues to build them in only small numbers, then foreign producers will step in and exploit their resources and production capacity.

Almost no Russian airline today can afford new foreign aircraft, which cost two to three times more than their Russian counterparts. The only airline in the Commonwealth of Independent States that is able to equip its fleet with new foreign aircraft is state-owned Aeroflot, which has purchased a few dozen foreign jets with significant state support.

So Russian airlines have been forced in recent years to turn to older foreign planes, which flooded the market after the fall in air traffic between 2001 and 2003. The cost of these jets was low enough to compensate for the 20 percent import tariffs and higher costs for maintenance and the retraining of personnel. Whereas Russian companies imported 20 of these planes in 2005, that number could rise to from 50 to 70 per year in 2006-2010. From an economic point of view, it is impossible for new aircraft to compete with used jets (foreign or domestic). But just buying older jets runs counter to the interests of passengers, whose lives and safety depend directly on the condition of an airline's fleet.

orders could be handled by five existing factories in Ulyanovsk, Voronezh, Samara, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Kazan, and could include the total production of about 150 aircraft from 2007-2010, with a total cost of about $3.6 billion.

An order of this size — nothing out of the ordinary in Soviet times — would be unprecedented in the post-1991 history of Russian aircraft production, which raises two questions: Are the factories in shape to fill such an order, and where will the necessary financing come from?