Air salon MAKS 2007 closed on Sunday in Zhukovsky. The total volume of deals made at the salon exceeded $3 billion. Besides, the event attracted thousands of visitors, who came to MAKS willing to see newly-designed jets and aircrafts.

Business

543 Russian and 243 foreign companies from 39 countries all over the world took part in MAKS 2007. The United Aircraft Building Corporation has concluded contracts totaling 1.5 billion dollars. Ilyushin Finance Co has also made several deals estimated at about 650 million dollars. Russian Rosoboronexport, a federal state unitary enterprise acting as the sole Russian state intermediary agency for export and import of military and dual-purpose products, technologies and services, has made about 330 million dollars at the salon. The total sum of agreements implying military and technical cooperation amounted to over 400 million dollars.

Additionally, the air salon performed as a place, where companies created joint ventures and announced their intentions concerning future cooperation. Particularly, the European Aerospace Corporation has indicated its willingness to acquire a block of shares of the United Aircraft Building Corporation. Boeing in its turn together with Russian VSMPO-Avisma (the world’s largest titanium producer) formed Ural Boeing Manufacturing Joint Venture to process titanium forgings for being used on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Russian Sukhoi Company and Italian Alenia Aeronautica have also set up a joint venture, but this time to sell and provide after sale services for Sukhoi SuperJet 100.

$3 billion of contracts can’t put MAKS 2007 in line with famous Le Bourget air show or other European air salons, where the size of transactions amounts to dozen billions of dollars; on the other hand, the program of demonstration flights is far more impressive at MAKS.

Display

At the same time the air salon didn’t live up to all expectations of the visitors. First of all, mock-ups were displayed instead of many advanced home-made aircrafts. As for the foreign participants, they also limited themselves to mock-ups. Airbus, for instance, found it unnecessary to display the new A380 plane at the salon, though other European air shows saw the aircraft flying. Boeing 787 Dreamliner wasn’t shown at the salon either. American F15 and F16 were probably the only foreign aircrafts demonstrated at MAKS.

Last three days, from Friday to Sunday, MAKS welcomed common tourists, who came to the air salon in great numbers. Lots of them had to spend a couple of hours stuck in traffic jams – traffic capacity failed to cope with so many cars. However, those, who managed to get to the place of demonstration, could see air display teams Strizhi (Swifts) and Russkie Vityazi (Russian Knights) performing new programs in the sky. French pilots closed the air salon with their spectacular “heart” drawn above the heads of the visitors and Russian tricolor. On the whole MAKS still remains an entertaining event rather than a business salon, which is proved by the number of transactions concluded at air shows in Russia and European countries.

Sources:

    www.lenta.ru
    www.rbc.ru
    www.gazeta.ru
 

Olga Pletneva