"The time is coming when a lot of Russian equipment will have to stop flying in and out of Europe," Martin Blain, Customer Business Director for Europe said in an interview on Wednesday during the Moscow air show.

High import duties on Airbus, Boeing and other foreign airliners have discouraged most Russian carriers, except larger airlines such as Aeroflot and Transaero, from investing in state-of-the-art western planes.

But rising fuel costs and an increasingly hostile regulatory environment in Western Europe are forcing many of them to think again.

The noisy, gas-guzzling three-engine Tupolev 154 is a mainstay of most Russian fleets on medium-haul routes and the ageing Tupolev 134 is still widely used on many regional routes.

But some European airports, such as Stockholm, are already charging higher landing fees for airlines flying high-polluting aircraft, said Blain, and the TU-154 is banned altogether from a number of airports.

The Transport Ministry has estimated that Russia will need 164 new long-range airliners and 146 regional airliners between now and 2010.

SECOND HAND JETS

Rolls-Royce believes its entry into the Russian civil aviation market will be through purchases of second-hand jets from western carriers powered by its engines. "The major route is through good-quality used western equipment," said Blain.

Transaero is buying five second-hand Boeing 747s from Virgin, powered by Rolls-Royce RB211 524D4 engines and charter airline Vim Avia is buying 12 Boeing 757s from a US carrier with the British firm's RB211 535E4 units.

"It gets us into the Russian aviation scene," said Blain, adding that Rolls-Royce could make money maintaining planes powered by its engine over the entire life of the aircraft.

Russian-made Tupolev 204 jets, powered by Rolls-Royce engines, have been supplied to China.

Rolls' US rival General Electric has stolen a march on the British engine maker in Russia because its CFM56 engine, jointly produced with Snecma Moteurs of France, powers Aeroflot's fleet of Airbus A320's and Boeing 737s.

"Russian airlines just selected planes where we did not feature," said Blain.

But Rolls-Royce is hoping that Russian airliners will pick its engines when in the future they come to order newer and larger planes such as the Boeing 777 and the 787 "Dreamliner", powered by its Trent family of engines.

Blain said it was hard to estimate how many corporate jets powered by its engines were flying in Russia because their Russian owners often registered the planes offshore.