Байкал — самолёт, который должен был заменить Ан-2, но так и не смог!

On May 14, 2025, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev publicly announced that production of the Baikal aircraft would not begin, stating that development had reached a dead end. A few hours later, the Ministry of Industry and Trade issued a denial: work was continuing, with ten billion rubles allocated. Two government departments from the same country disagreed over the fate of a single aircraft in a single day. The LMS-901 Baikal had been in development since 2019 as a replacement for the An-2, a 1947 biplane that remains indispensable on unpaved runways, in the taiga, and above the Arctic Circle. The new aircraft was supposed to fly faster and further. However, its landing speed turned out to be one and a half times higher than that of the An-2—and for short unpaved runways, this poses a direct risk. The story of how to replace a simple and ingenious machine turned out to be significantly more difficult than expected.