The demise of the Soviet Union hit many industries hard. And civil aviation was no exception in this regard: the difficult nineties did not allow the state to to finance promising projects of aircraft created at the end of the USSR, and then they became morally become obsolete. Therefore, many developments that were planned to replace old cars did not go into mass production. Your attention is the "four" aircraft, which the collapse of the Soviet Union did not allow to take off.
1. Tu-334
The need to develop this aircraft was first discussed in the late eighties as a future replacement for the Yak-40 and Tu-134. But the collapse of the USSR significantly slowed down this process, so it went on its first flight only in 1999. After carrying out the necessary tests in 2005, the order of the Russian government was signed to start production in Kazan, but the Superjet-100 project being developed at the same time intervened in the matter. And the authorities, when choosing between two aircraft, gave a ticket to life only to the second. And the Tu-334 remained in the amount of two prototypes, although it had good inclinations for implementation: it was completely domestic, and besides, he could potentially land at any airport, which he is not able to afford "Superjet-100".
2. Tu-324/Tu-414
Unlike the previous brainchild of Tupolev, this project does not even have experimental prototypes, but remains on paper and in the form of scale models. Despite the good technical characteristics that were put into it - and the concept involved the creation of two modifications at once, the Tu-324 itself and an elongated version under index Tu-414 - and the support of the government of Tatarstan, which purchased modern equipment for its Kazan aircraft plant for this production, development has not been started. And experts today believe that this project had a good potential both domestically and for export.
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3. IL-114
An aircraft that has lost the opportunity to become massive. / Photo: wikipedia.org
In comparison with other machines created in this difficult time, the IL-114, by some miracle, even got into mass production, but its fate also turned out to be sad. Initially, it was conceived as a successor to the An-24 and a serious competitor to the foreign SAAB 2000 and ATR-72. But in the late eighties, the Tashkent plant managed to produce only 18 copies of the aircraft, so the possibility of replacing it with another mass-produced aircraft was quickly dismissed. In the nineties, there was no funding for further release, and then, when about the restoration production began to speak again, the IL-114 was already considered obsolete in a constructive machine plan. Even now, when the active development of the modernized version of the Il-114-300 has begun, many experts are skeptical about these attempts.
4. S-21
The most offensive loss among the late Soviet aircraft. /Photo: testpilot.ru
This project, developed in the eighties of past centuries, was considered almost the pinnacle of technological progress. First of all, its functionality as a supersonic business jet contributed to such fame, which was something unknown in those years. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the difficulties of the nineties did not allow it to be implemented, and this despite the fact that funding from the United States was even allocated for its creation. And experts all these years consider the refusal to create the S-21 one of the biggest losses of domestic civil aviation, because in the case of implementation project on the market of supersonic business jets, which was not yet formed in those years, this machine could become and hold the title for many years monopolist.
In continuation of the topic, the sad story of another promising domestic aircraft: Why did the Soviet liner T-144, which overtook the sound and its time, ended up not needed
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/170122/61820/