The upgraded Il-76 productionising programme is under way at Aviastar-SP under the governmental resolution dated 20 December 2006. The feature setting Aircraft 476 radically apart from the Il-76 previously built in Tashkent is to be a redesigned wing with wing panels that are single-piece throughout their wingspan. The wing panels lack the middle spar in the wing box and with the stringer set riveted to the wing panels. The designers expect the solutions to slash the structural weight by far. The planes to be made in Ulyanovsk will be powered by PS-90A-76 engines as some of the last versions of the Tashkent-made Il-76 are. Ulyanovsk-manufactured transports will carry an up-to-date avionics suite that will show information on six 6x8-inch multifunction displays (MFD). All technical documentation relevant to the plane is issued in the digital form.

The ‘all-glass’ flight-deck of the upgraded Il-76 was unveiled at MAKS 2011 in August. The mockup displayed is a stand for testing and debugging avionics and airborne equipment and for training test pilots in flying the upgraded plane.
Assembly of the fuselage sections of the first two Il-76TD-90As began in Aviastar’s assembly shop in 2009. A year later, manufacture of new-design wing panels commenced there. To speed up the construction, some of the airframe’s assemblies for the first two planes (empennage and wingtips) have been ordered from TAPC in Tashkent. The prototype of the upgraded Il-76 is expected to fly for the first time in Ulyanovsk early in 2012.

Aviastar plans to launch production of the upgraded aircraft once the prototypes have completed their test programme. Manufacture of parts for the first three production planes started as far back as July of last year. The plant is going to make three production aircraft a year at first, with the subsequent output rate to grow up to seven planes per annum.

Not only the Il-76MD-90A airlifter and Il-76TD-90A commercial transport versions are planned to be made in Ulyanovsk under the Ilyushin 476 programme, but a number of special variants as well. For instance, Ilyushin 476 is to be used as the platform for a new tanker plane intended to replace the Il-78 and Il-78M built in Tashkent previously. A model of the future AEW&C aircraft based on the Ilyushin 476 airframe was shown during the International Air Transport Forum in Ulyanovsk in April this year, with the aircraft featuring a redesigned wing, PS-90A-76 engines and other design features of future Aviastar-made Il-76s. The plane has all of the accoutrements of the A-50 AEW&C aircraft and its latest versions and upgrades, e.g. a radar in the spine-mounted rotodome, other extra antenna systems and equipment cooling air intakes set in various parts of the airframe, metal fuselage nose section instead of the characteristic Il-76 airlifter’s navigator’s ‘glass bubble’, in-flight refuelling system, etc.

That the advanced AEW&C system will be based on the Ulyanovsk-upgraded Il-76 was told to the media in August by Russian Air Force chief Col.-Gen. Alexandr Zelin: “There is full backing by the chief of the General staff, there is financial support. The aircraft is to be developed by 2016, and the platform itself is to be ready about 2013–14”.

The Russian Defence Ministry is expected to be the launch customer for the Ulyanovsk-made Ilyushin 476, after which domestic and foreign commercial operators may apply too. Aviastar Director General Sergei Dementyev estimates the overall volume of the 476 programme throughout 2020 at about a hundred aircraft.