What does it take to sell a Russian jet to a Russian airline? A cockpit that doesn’t need a three-person crew, but the Tu-214‘s manufacturer can’t promise that.

A deal between S7 Airlines and the State Transport Leasing Company (GTLK) for up to 100 Tu-214 passenger jets could collapse — or be scaled back to a minimum number of aircraft — according to the Russian business daily Kommersant, which cited sources in the aviation industry.

Kommersant’s sources named three main reasons the deal could fall through:

• the manufacturer, the Kazan Aviation Plant, cannot guarantee that the cockpit will be redesigned for a two-person crew (it is currently built for three);
• the plane’s flight performance needs to improve, and its maintenance downtime must shrink;
• there is no state subsidy to reduce the plane’s price from nearly 9 billion rubles.

Under a memorandum S7 signed with the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC, part of the state corporation Rostec) in 2024, the contract must be approved and signed by the end of 2026.

Aeroflot had already demanded the same cockpit overhaul. In 2022, the state-controlled airline planned to order 40 Tu-214s, but two years later it dropped both the Tu-214 and the SJ-100, redirecting its order to the MC-21. Aeroflot’s decision to drop the Tu-214 was attributed to the plane’s “outdated” cockpit and delivery delays.

S7 told Kommersant that talks over the deliveries are continuing and that there is “no question of negotiations falling through.”

One of the newspaper’s sources said S7 would ultimately sign a contract for as many planes as the industry considers sufficient to guard against a fleet shortage.

Price, the source added, would not be a problem, given S7’s willingness to buy and restore old Airbus jets while its own A320neos sit idle. Russian airlines are not flying about half of their A320neo and A321neo fleets because sanctions leave them unable to service the planes, Kommersant reported earlier.

Other sources believe S7 may follow Aeroflot’s lead and redirect its order to the MC-21.

The Tu-214 is a Russian narrow-body, medium-range aircraft that first flew in 1996. Between 2010 and 2022, it was produced in special configurations for government use. Among its users are Russia’s Defense Ministry, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Rossiya special flight squadron, which carries Russian officials.

In 2022, after Boeing and Airbus left Russia over the war in Ukraine, the Russian government approved an “anti-sanctions” program to build civilian aircraft. The first “import-substituted,” fully domestic Tu-214s were supposed to reach customers in 2023, but none rolled out until 2025.

The Kazan Aviation Plant, busy with state defense orders since the start of the war, failed to bring new Tu-214 production capacity online on schedule, according to Kommersant. The first four Tu-214s for state aviation are due in 2026, with eight more in 2027 and output eventually reaching up to 20 planes a year.