The paper studies structural features and territorial shifts in the civil aircraft industry of the USSR and post-Soviet countries. A typology of plants by the dynamics of their production is developed using statistical data. A hypothesis on the lifecycles of the identified types of companies is formulated, which allows one to predict their contribution to the production of civil aircraft. Russian aircraft manufacturers are grouped in accordance with their place in the structure of regional employment. It is shown that if the aviation industry of Siberia and the Far East occupies a dominant position in the mechanical engineering of the region and even determines its specialization, in the old industrial Middle Volga regions, aircraft production is organically integrated into the developed industrial environment. The ‘compression’ of the aircraft building space is revealed, i.e. mass serial production is concentrated in single centers, with the aircraft industry being withdrawn from the non-Russian territories of the post-Soviet space. The ‘Eastern’ gradient in the placement of new production sites is ascertained: in the post-Soviet period, they are being developed in the Siberian and Far Eastern regions.