Russia’s MC-21 Airliner Performs Automatic Landing with Indigenous PD-14 Engines

Russia’s MC-21 aircraft executed an automatic landing in accordance with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Category IIIA standards.

The flight was conducted on the MC-21 with a crew consisting of pilots Roman Taskaev and Igor Chernov from GosNIIGA, alongside leading flight test engineers Oleg Berezin and Pavel Sokut.

ICAO Category IIIA allows landings with a runway visual range of at least 200 meters and a decision altitude below 30 meters. Aircraft adhering to this category must maintain automatic control until touchdown on the runway.

This flight was part of a broader test program aiming to validate the aircraft’s automatic landing systems, with approximately 100 flights planned in total. The software algorithms and the hardware information and computing complex of the control system, which ensure the automatic landing of the MC-21, were entirely developed in Russia. The first flight of this program occurred in December 2023 using an aircraft equipped with an imported power plant.