AVIC II and Yak announced a joint program on basic Trainer

August 21 in Russian MAKS 2007 Airshow, Liang Zhenhe, who is the senior vice president of AVIC II, announced that China and Russia has reached an agreement to jointly develop a fresh new basic trainer for defense and civilian market.

Liang says that the Chinese AVIC II and A.S. Yakovlev Design Bureau will cooperate under the rules of joint investment and co-development but risk and profit sharing. AVIC II and Yakovlev will separately invest 50% of the program and respectively build an assembly line in China and Russia. But Liang did not provide the aircraft model and detailed investment amount.

According to Liang's words, the prototype of new basic Trainer will be produced in the year of 2008 and be finished its first flight in the first half of 2009. The roadmap of Sino-Russia trainer program is to achieve airworthiness certificates in correspondent domestic markets, then the aircraft will got FAA's EAC(Experimental Airworthiness Certificate) and JAA's JAR-23(Joint Aviation Requirement) certificates so as to enter international trainer market with full capacity.

Liang Zhenhe expresses that great potentiality exists in Sino-Russia aviation cooperation just because China has expanding aviation market excited by speedy economic growth and Russia has obvious technological predominance to support China's requirements. Liang says that the China domestic market will at least demand over 300 basic trainers but some common problems need to be resolved, such as building up a full after service system for aircrafts.

The assembly line in China will probably be constructed in HongDu Aviation Industry Group, which was previously called as "Nanchang Aircraft Company" and has been the main trainer manufacturer for PLAAF. The well-known CJ-6 basic trainer has been produce over 3000 aircrafts by Nanchang Company and its exported variant BT-6 won good public praises in western users.

Although Liang did not tell the aircraft model, his announcement still verified HongDu's three years before cooperative proposal on YAK-152 with Yakovlev. But no information about YAK-152K can be found from the official website of Yakovlev Design Bureau.

From Hongdu's inside reports, it can be discovered that Hongdu had organized experts to evaluate the program of YAK-152K (YAK-152's Chinese Version, K means China) in 2004. The report estimated that the whole investment was about 6.8 million US$ and Target cost of single aircraft would be 179,200 US$ (RMB 1.36 million) then price to be 224,000 US$ (RMB 1.7 million).