The IL-86: The Soviets' Botched Answer to the 747

Ahh, the Cold War, that long since (kind of) put to bed period of intercontinental tally wacker swinging, when the superpowers sat across from one another, and shook their fists with ever more vigour, all the while backing said shaking up with increasingly tarty toys and Gucci kit, with them endeavouring to one up each other over and over again.

It’s a period that, naturally, attracts more than its fair share of attention from fancy machine enjoyers, and more often than not, it is attention that is directed firmly towards military machines. What is lesser appreciated, however, is that the perpetual one-upmanship competition that was the Cold War also extended into civil engineering, with results that were often times no less grandiose in their scope than their martial counterparts—and today, we’re going to be looking at one such example; which would be the Soviet Union’s attempt to cook up a Boeing 747 equivalent, that being the world’s first jumbo jet, for themselves: the IL-86.

Technical Design

We’ll start by putting the term ‘jumbo jet’ to bed for the rest of the article, and be technical about it instead, as what the IL-86, and indeed the 747 as well, was, was a so called ‘wide body airliner,’ that being a term that means exactly what it says on the tin: a girthy airliner meant to REALLY cram the people in—with the commonly accepted definition being “any passenger aircraft with a fuselage wide enough to accommodate two passenger aisles.”

This, naturally, meant that the IL-86 was a bit of a big boy, measuring 60.2 meters in length, with a wingspan of 48.1 meters. To help visualize its size, you can compare it to better known Lockheed L-1011 TriStar or the Douglas DC-10, with the former measuring 54.2 meters in length with a wingspan of 50.1 meters, while the latter comes in slightly larger, at 55.5 meters in length and a wingspan of 50.4 meters—so picture them, and you’re about right. This size, in an all-economy nine abreast configuration, also gave the IL-86 a passenger capacity of 350.

Powering the Il-86 were four Kuznetsov NK-86 low-bypass turbofan engines, each producing 127 kilonewtons of thrust. These engines were derivatives of the earlier NK-8 engines used on the Ilyushin Il-62, and, coupled with 70,000 litres worth of fuel tanks, afforded a maximum range of approximately 2,500 nautical miles, significantly less than its Western counterparts. A DC-10-30, for example, could happily squeeze just shy of 6,000 nautical miles out of its General Electric CF6-50C engines, and 138,000 litre fuel tanks.

The Il-86’s flight deck featured a three-crew layout, consisting of a pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer. This configuration, which was actually quite common the world over at the time, was a notable step forward for Soviet airliners, as earlier designs often required a larger crew, including a navigator and radio operator. The cockpit was equipped with analogue instrumentation, again typical of the era, though it lacked some of the advanced avionics seen in contemporary Western aircraft.

All in all, then, it’s safe to say that this sounds pretty normal, right? So where does the archetypal Soviet weirdness come into it all?

Well, we’ve actually already seen a little bit of it, and the eagle eared aviation enthusiasts among you all might have already picked up on it.

For example, remember when we said it had “nine abreast” seating? Well, there’s a little bit of weirdness right there, because, both nowadays and back in the day, most airlines go for a 10 abreast arrangement in their economy class, usually in a 3-4-3 configuration. This meant that the IL-86 was WEIRDLY roomy in the elbow department, even in economy class.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: “Oh, so its passengers had a touch more sideways room, HOW INTERESTING,” but don’t worry, that’s just the start of things, and it gets WAY weirder from there.

For example, did you notice that the IL-86 also did not have any storage bins above the central seating, and that the ones it does have to the side were WEIRDLY slim? This, of course, contributes to the ‘roominess’ of the thing, alongside the seating arrangement, but this wasn’t actually done for the passengers benefit at all, but rather the airport’s.

You see, Soviet Airports were terrible, and that’s an unfortunate fact. Whereas Western Airports, even pretty middling ones in terms of volume, were well set up to accommodate VAST numbers of passengers, Soviet ones simply were not, and this presented quite an issue, because if they nailed a wide-body, and start chucking more people up into the sky, how were they ever meant to accommodate all of that extra baggage, without an extensive and expensive rebuilding of basically EVERY major airport in the country?

The answer: you keep your suitcases with you as you trundle through departures, and then chuck them on the plane yourself before taking your seat, thus totally eliminating the need to construct all new luggage handling facilities the nation over, just to accommodate the increased passenger volume the IL-86 would allow.

And as for how this led to the elimination and shrinking of internal overhead compartments, off the back of that idea, a bright spark at Ilyushin had a complimentary idea: just get them to chuck all but their most immediate essentials into the hold while they were there, then we can make the cabin roomier and blag this bodge as a feature—genius!

But wait, there’s more weirdness still, because you know how Soviet Airports were, well, terrible? It turns out that contending with that fact led to even more peculiarities with the IL-86, such as the fact that the Soviets didn’t really trust their civil runways to be happy dealing with MUCH heavier aircraft, and so, they incorporated a fourth landing gear, at the back, between the two ‘normal’ ones—spreading the weight of the aircraft over 14 tyres, rather than the 10 they’d otherwise have, and thus sparing their runways from excessive load.

Large numbers of landing gears are normal on Western aircraft too, but to find them, we usually have to look at the REALLY big stuff; your 747s, which can happily weigh in at double and the rest of an IL-86, and the like. Take a look at one of the ones we said came in at a similar size to the IL-86 earlier, specifically the L-1011, and how many landing gears do you see? Yep, three.

Then there’s the fact that the IL-86 had elevators, three of them to be precise, which the cabin crew used to access the galleys mid-flight. This wasn’t a design choice caused through a bodge, however, instead, the wrinkle brains at Ilyushin simply thought it was a better use of space than having galleys on the main deck, where they would eat into valuable passenger space, and that by using elevators to access them rather than stairs, the cabin crew would still be able to make use of those handy insulated trolleys that airlines always have.

The IL-86 also made use of hydraulically folding out stairs for passenger disembarkation, simply because jet bridges, the airport-ese for those tunnels you walk through to get onto a plane, weren’t really a thing at Soviet Airports; they were terrible remember, even by the Soviets’ own admission.

This, in and of itself, isn’t THAT weird, and even today, there are plenty of aircraft that have them, modern Boeing 737-800’s and MAX’s being a great example, but they are narrow bodies, you basically NEVER find them on widebodies, at all, the assumption by their designers being that they’ll always be using jet bridges anyway, and the odd time that you can’t use one of them, for whatever reason, the airport will just tow external staircases into position. So yeah, the fact that they were such a key point to the IL-86’s design and on the ground operation—WEIRD.

Even the engines on the IL-86 were weird. Remember when we said it used four Kuznetsov NK-86 low-bypass engines? Well, it’s the ‘low-bypass’ part of that which is weird, because starting with the introduction of the 747 in 1970, which used ‘high-bypass’ Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines, everyone knew that such engines were the way of the future.

And if you’re wondering what the difference is, don’t worry, we got you covered. Put simply, the key difference between high and low-bypass jet engines is that high-bypass engines push most of the air that enters them around the engine core for more fuel-efficient operation, as that extra movement of air creates ‘free’ thrust, and low-bypass engines direct more air through the core for greater thrust and speed, but with higher noise and fuel consumption.

For commercial service, a high-bypass engine is what you want then; as it’ll still get up to basically the same speeds, but use far less fuel while doing so—and yet the IL-86 went for low-bypass, why?

That would be because it turns out that high bypass engines are actually quite tricky things to engineer, and the Soviet Union simply wasn’t up to it—and so it was good old-fashioned engines it got bolted under its wings instead. This, incidentally, is also no small part of why the IL-86 had such a limited range as compared to its contemporaries.

And that should just about do us for our discussion of the IL-86’s design, at least without going into the really, REALLY niche and technical stuff, but we’re sure most of you won’t be interested in the fact that it used a hydraulic servo rudder trim actuator mechanism rather than an electric motor-driven one, so we shall bring this chapter to an end, and move on!

Development History

The IL-86 has its roots in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Western widebodies were just entering onto the scene, with the Boeing 747 making its maiden flight in 1969, and both the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 TriStar making theirs the following year.

In short, the Soviets saw what the Americans were doing, and they wanted a bit of that for themselves. Don’t think the decision was wholly one of chest beating and flag waving keep-up-ism, however, because while that very much was a part of it, it was the Cold War after all, there was also a very practical element to their desire; because Soviet passenger numbers were EXPLODING, with Aeroflot, the Soviet Union’s only airline, predicting that it would soon be carrying over 100 million passengers a year—a figure which it sure enough hit in 1976.

And so, the die was cast some time in the late 1960s, the sources aren’t clear on exactly when, with the Soviet Ministry of Civil Aviation stating that it wanted a large capacity airliner capable of carrying at least 350 passengers, and subsequently ordering the country’s various aircraft concerns to get on making it happen.

This led to all sorts of designs coming across their desk, with the most peculiar of the lot being a proposal by Antonov, to turn their An-22 military transport aircraft into a gigantic double decker monster of an aircraft that could carry over 700 passengers. This idea was rejected however; partly due to the fact that with the An-22 being turboprop powered rather than by a ‘true’ suck in air make it hot and throw out the back to move type jet, i.e. a turbojet or turbofan, it was feared that the west would write it off as evidence of Soviet technological stagnation, but also because Antonov was VERY cordial with the recently disgraced and ousted leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, and they didn’t exactly want him finding a way to stick his nose into any important matters of state.

As for Ilyushin, despite eventually winning the contract, they actually didn’t propose a widebody at all to begin with, but a stretched variant of their Il-62, which was rejected for failing to meet the 350-passenger requirement. Luckily for them, however, the Il-62 was such a well-regarded bit of jet-powered kit, that they were given the contract anyway, just with the VERY clear warning that the passenger capacity was firm and non-negotiable, and thus development officially began in 1971.

With the task before them being such an important one, some of Ilyushin’s biggest names found themselves assigned to the project, with some notable examples being Genrikh Novozhilov, a man with no small hand in designing the previous Il-18, 62, and 76, as well as none other than Sergey Ilyushin himself, who, as you likely guessed from the name, was the man who founded the whole bureau. He had actually retired in 1970, but a burgeoning interest in the edge-pushing project, coupled with the fact that he actually found retirement quite dull, meant he was only too happy to pop back into the office and lend his talents.

And that, pretty much, is the abridged story of the IL-86’s development—those two and their subordinates got to work, and then, in 1976 five years after development began, voilà, the finished IL-86 took its first test flight.

It, naturally, was hailed as a triumph of Soviet engineering when it entered flight, but curiously, it may not have been the indigenous wonder that it was touted as, and it all goes back to a clandestine meeting of American and Soviet engineers in Paris in 1971.

You see, they both had something the other wanted: with the Americans knowing their way around a widebody, and the Soviets being clued up on supersonic airliners thanks to the Tupolev Tu-144, and while making small talk at that year’s Paris Airshow, Novozhilov and Joe Sutter of Boeing got to the matter of potentially doing a bit of mutual backscratching, and with both of their respective governments being game, the pair later met up at a café, with CLEAR instructions about what they were and weren’t allowed to share.

With the pair soon running out of notepaper, and resorting to sketching on their tablecloth, Novozhilov told all on working with titanium, a vital heat-resistant material for supersonic aircraft, and Sutter explained all the rationale and methodology behind mounting engines underneath the wing.

Ultimately, we don’t know just how much this meeting went on to influence the IL-86, and the matter is still hotly debated by aviation historians. It’s a legitimately tricky matter too, because sure, while Soviet jetliners before the meeting looked one way, so we might be inclined to assume Ilyushin ripped the idea straight from Boeing, their Il-76 did take its first flight two months before the Paris Air Show, and it looks rather similar—so yeah, who knows, at least until some more archive digging is done over in Russia anyway!

Service History

The IL-86 entered service in December 1980 when Aeroflot put them into their commercial roster. Its inaugural flight, from Moscow to Tashkent in the Uzbeki SSR also went off without a hitch, and from there it gradually became a vital part of the Soviet Union’s domestic operations, slowly beginning to supplement its Tu-154 forerunner as and when more airframes became available.

Do note, however, it did NOT replace the IL-62, despite the fact that that particular plane was a narrow body that first flew back in 1963. The reason for this? That would be its range, or rather, the lack thereof, which it turned out wasn’t just terrible compared to western airliners, but also the IL-62, which could squeeze out around 5,500 nautical miles on a good day thanks to its lightweight construction and disproportionately HUGE fuel tanks, as compared to the IL-86’s 2,500 or so. Consequently, if you were flying from, say, Moscow to Vladivostok, it’d be old dependable that got you there—really, despite the whole widebody arrangement naturally bringing images of a long-range jet to mind, and many pundits referring to it as such, for some reason, we are far better off thinking of the IL-86 as a medium range jet, that just so happened to be designed to properly cram the passengers in.

It also flew internationally, because don’t forget, while we think of the Soviet Union as an isolationist nation locked behind the iron curtain, it had plenty of friends locked in there with it, and so the IL-86 found its way to Berlin Schönefeld Airport in East Germany, Warsaw-Okęcie Airport in Poland, and Bucharest Otopeni Airport in Romania—to name just a few.

And on the subject of international use, we also should mention the non-Aeroflot airlines that used it, of which there were quite a few. The vast majority of them were airlines founded in post-Soviet nations after the union collapsed, with examples being Armenian Airlines, Kazakhstan Airlines, and Ukraine International Airlines, but two of them were based outside of the Soviet and later post-Soviet worlds, with the two airlines in question being China Xinjiang Airlines, which bought three of them in 1990, and Hajvairy Airlines, Pakistan’s first privately owned airline, which leased two of them from Aeroflot in the “early 1990s,” whenever that actually means, our sources didn’t bother to say, through to October 1993.

As for its safety record, at least as far as we know, because the Soviet Union wasn’t exactly a regime known for its transparency, that appears to have been pretty solid, with the IL-86 not suffering a single known fatal accident during passenger carrying operations. Emphasis on the words ‘passenger carrying,’ however, because it did suffer one BAD accident in July 2002, when Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 9560, taking off from Moscow and being a crew-only flight, suddenly went into the full-up trim position, which, in simple terms, means that the aircraft was set to tilt the nose as high as possible, and with the pilots not having the time to correct, it stalled, and crashed barely a minute after take-off, killing 14 of the 16 crew on board.

It should be noted, however, that the Interstate Aviation Committee was unable to determine why it went full trim, so we aren’t sure whether the blame lies with the aircraft itself, or someone involved in operating it.

Then there’s the matter of how many of them were produced, which would be 106 across its 15-year manufacturing run, which lasted from 1976 to 1991.

And to put that figure into perspective, the Tu-154 it supplemented had a grand total of 1,026 units produced during a 29-year production run that began in 1968, and the IL-62 had 292 units produced during its 32-year production run.

All in all, pretty poor numbers then, and it only gets worse when you start comparing it to Western jets. For example, the 747 that it had been intended to be the Soviet answer to, had 1,574 units produced over a whopping 55-year production run that only ended in 2023. Even the L-1011, which was a failure so bad that Lockheed completely pulled the plug on commercial aircraft production managed to see 250 units made before the plug was pulled.

Of course, in many ways, comparing aircraft made in a planned economy to those made in a market economy is akin to comparing apples to oranges, and there’s also the fact that the Soviet Union began to come apart at the seams not long after the IL-86 first took flight, which didn’t exactly help expedite production, but nonetheless, such comparisons prove the objective point that it was an aircraft that simply wasn’t made in great numbers.

The Future of Russian Widebodies?

Had the Soviet Union stayed duct taped together for just a while longer, it is likely that the IL-86, and its younger variant, the IL-96—which is just a slightly more polished version of the IL-86 that entered service in 1992, don’t worry too much about it—would have been made in larger numbers, but it didn’t, and so, basically every airline in the post-Soviet space started exercising their newfound economic freedom, and bought Western jets instead, with even Aeroflot’s modern fleet using Airbus A330’s and A350’s, as well as Boeing 777’s for its widebody needs.

The Government of Independent Russia, as the inheritor of much of the Soviet Union’s aerospace industry once the wall came down, was unwilling to totally abandon its legacy advanced industries however, and so has kept the IL-86 alive on life support, lest it lose those skills altogether.

It has done this partly by retaining three old IL-86’s for military use, but mostly, it has done this by REFUSING to close down production of the IL-96 variant, even as basically NO orders come in, with a mere 33 of them having been built in total, with that figure not being counted among the 106 IL-86’s made, incidentally. Of those 33 too, all but four of them are used by the Russian government, with another single example being used by ‘Sky Gates,’ a Russian cargo and charter airline, and the other three being used by ‘Cubana de Aviación,’ the flag carrier of Cuba—who, because of sanctions, isn’t exactly able to buy American aircraft.

And for YEARS that was the end of the story, and soon enough, it was reasoned by most of the commentariat, the Russian Government would pull the plug and give it all up as a bad job.

That all changed in February 2022, however, when the Russian Military commenced its invasion of Ukraine, because nearly overnight, Russia was totally cut off from the Western Aerospace Industry, both in terms of spare parts and technical expertise, as well as, of course, new airframe procurement. NOW, the commentariat shouted en-masse, the IL-96 would now have a renaissance, as Russian airlines would have nowhere else to turn…

The enthusiastic chorus failed to appreciate two key points however, firstly, that Russian Airlines all finding themselves banned from the airspace of Washington aligned nations overnight RATHER reduced demand for their services and made buying new aircraft a moot point, and secondly, that they could keep the Western aircraft they already had going by simply buying parts through other countries that were cordial with Russia, but that Washington didn’t deem naughty enough to be subjected to full lockdown sanctions.

For the IL-96, however, this means that its prophesised renaissance hasn’t really happened. There’s been the odd order here and there as legitimate needs have arisen for new aircraft, three of them to be precise, but that’s it.

Never say never, however. Should the current state of affairs drag on and Russia’s Western Widebodies start to age out of operability, it’s within the realm of reason that IL-96 production might be PROPERLY restarted.

Indeed, this is exactly what has happened with Russia’s narrow body airliners, as orders for them have REALLY started to pile up in the last couple of years, with Aeroflot alone currently having orders for 89 Sukhoi Superjet’s, 40 Tupolev Tu-204’s, and 266 Yakovlev MC-21’s as of the time of writing—so yeah, if those A330’s, A350’s, and 777’s start to get too old, maybe we will indeed see IL-96 make a return.

Key Takeaways

• The Soviet Union’s IL-86 was designed to compete with the Boeing 747, featuring a wide-body design.
• The IL-86 had unique design features like nine-abreast seating and slim overhead bins to accommodate Soviet airports’ limitations.
• The aircraft used low-bypass turbofan engines, which were less fuel-efficient but easier for the Soviets to engineer.
• The IL-86 had a shorter range compared to Western counterparts due to its engine limitations and fuel capacity.
• Despite its initial success, the IL-86’s production was limited, with only 106 units made between 1976 and 1991.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: The IL-86: The Soviets’ Botched Answer to the 747
• Hero image source by kitmasterbloke / openverse, by.

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