MiG to Fold into UAC With Sukhoi?

MiG-35D

As Sukhoi’s SU-30 family of large, multi-role fighters has come to dominate Russian aircraft exports over the past decade, the positions of Sukhoi and MiG have reversed. Now MiG is the deeply secondary design bureau, and Sukhoi is the firm designing Russia’s flagship fighters. Russian weapons exports have risen sharply over the past 5 years, but the overall volume of orders for Russian manufacturers has plunged without the Soviet empire’s vast arms budget, network of dependent clients, and the global military tensions and warfare that accompanied its drive for expansion.

That has created serious trouble for RAC MiG. Their MiG 1.44 design lost to Sukhoi’s PAK-FA in the competition to become Russia’s future fighter, their MiG-AT lost the future trainer market to the Yakolev/Aermacchi Yak-130, and their flagship MiG-29 now struggles to find buyers on the international market, despite multi-role upgrades. India is buying about 45 MiG-29K aircraft for its aircraft carriers, and the omnidirectional thrust-vectoring MiG-29OVT/MiG-35 variant is a candidate in India’s 126-plane MMRCA competition, but sales elsewhere have been slow. Algeria’s cancellation of its $1.3 – 1.5 billion, 34 plane MiG-29 buy has hit the company hard on multiple fronts. Even Russia’s recent $615 million purchase of the 28 MiG-29SMT multi-role fighters from that deal will not solve the firm’s $1.5 billion in reported debts…