17.03.2025, Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
The Russian Superjet with domestic PD-8 engines has completed its first test flight. Russian Rostec Corporation wrote about this on March 17 by on its Telegram channel.
The aircraft’s crew fully executed the flight mission, achieving a speed of approximately 500 km/h and an altitude of up to 3,000 meters. The plane was in the air for 40 minutes. The PD-8 engines demonstrated stable operation at both constant and variable modes.
Sergey Chemezov, CEO of Rostec, stated, “Today’s flight confirms the correctness of our engineering calculations and the high readiness of the aircraft. The project is being implemented within a very tight timeframe by global aviation standards. After 2022, the Superjet essentially had to be reassembled from scratch. At the same time, the engine is one of the key elements of the import substitution program – it is the ‘heart’ of the aircraft. There is still much work and many flights ahead. In April, another fully Russian aircraft with PD-8 engines will join the certification flight tests.”
The abbreviation PD-8 stands for “Prospective Engine with 8 ton-force” – a Russian engine from the family of advanced civil turbofan engines, developed based on the PD-14 engine, with a reduction in fan diameter from 1.9 to 1.23 meters and thrust from 14 to 7–9 tons.
The task is challenging because increasing the fan diameter improves engine efficiency. This can be explained simply: to create a fixed thrust force, you need to either throw a larger mass of air backward at a certain speed or, for example, half the volume but at twice the speed.
And this thrown-back mass carries away the energy you spent to accelerate it. The kinetic energy of a body is proportional to the square of its speed, while momentum depends linearly on speed.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
