It certainly won’t send an aviation enthusiast’s heart racing like the promise of nimble flying characteristics or technical wizardry in the cockpit, but how an OEM supports its product after the sale perhaps means as much to an airline as any performance specification one might care to name. So while at the outset of the Superjet 100’s development sentiment varied about the ability of Sukhoi Civil Aircraft (SCAC) to produce a competitive regional jet, few would argue that building the capacity to support the product to Western standards ranked as one of the project’s most daunting challenges.
The job of answering that challenge has fallen on Superjet International, the joint venture established in July 2007 by Italy’s Alenia and SCAC specifically to serve the product-support needs of the SSJ customer base. Two-and-a-half years later, Russia’s Aeroflot and Armenia’s Armavia stand to become the first to test Superjet International’s readiness, as the airlines prepare to take delivery of the first two production-standard SSJ100s this month–S/N numbers 95008 and 95007, respectively.
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