The Franco-Russian joint venture between Snecma and NPO Saturn has reported reaching a milestone in the production of PowerJet SaM146 engines.

On 18 April, the enterprise shipped the 60th turbofan to Sukhoi's plant KnAAPO which assembles Superjet 100 regional aircraft.

NPO Saturn says PowerJet built and supplied 30 engines in 2012 alone. Under this year's plan, its annual output should reach 52.

The SaM146 programme director Mikhail Berdennikov says the production rate has ramped up energetically.

"Since the start of serial production, we've practically doubled annual output and have fully met customer requirements," he says. "We'll keep up this growth rate in order to increase production volume to 150 engines by 2015-16."

Source: Air Transport Intelligence news