More than two years have passed since the start of the special military operation and the imposition of “hellish sanctions” against Russia’s civil aviation industry. In 2022, some domestic media, relying on the opinion of “experts”, predicted the complete collapse of passenger air travel in our country. The predictions were akin to the apocalypse: it is dangerous to fly, we will not fly, there is nothing to fly on. Everything is bad, we will all die…
However, now it is 2024, Boeing and Airbus are being bought back from foreign lessors, aircrafts are flying, their maintenance is being carried out, passenger traffic is growing, and in general the country’s civil aviation industry has adjusted to the restrictions imposed and is functioning quite confidently. Of course, there are problems, and they concern, first of all, the production of domestic aircraft.
“After 24 February, Aeroflot’s problems became a symbol of Russia’s isolation. As a result of the impact of unprecedented economic sanctions, the company is shifting its focus to domestic flights and Russian-made aircraft. New Boeing 737 MAX 8 and Airbus A350-900 aircraft, which S7 Airlines and Aeroflot intended to add to their fleets, are being sold like hotcakes by Turkish and Indian airlines. And we can forget about Pobeda’s grandiose order for 100 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft,” says a certain investment banker Evgeny Kogan in one of his predictions.
It is quite likely that B737 MAX aircraft were sold “like hotcakes”, but it was not due to the fact that Boeing banned their deliveries to Russia because of the Air Defence Systems. Aircraft of this type cannot in principle be operated in our country, because due to the irresponsible approach to their development and testing on the part of the American corporation, as early as 14 March 2019, Rosaviatsia banned Boeing 737 MAX flights in Russian airspace until special instructions. In June, when Evgeny Kogan wrote his article, he couldn’t have been unaware of this.
In July 2022, RBC and Izvestia, citing the Aeronautical Information Centre, reported that air carriers from friendly countries were allowed to use Boeing 737 MAX for flights to Russia. But Rosaviatsia did not re-certify this type, and the ban itself is still in effect and was introduced three years before the special operation and “hellish sanctions”, and Pobeda did not order 100 aircraft, but only 20 with an option for another 30 aircraft.
The “expert” also touched on the detention of Aeroflot’s A330 aircraft in Sri Lanka on 2 June 2022.
“The recent situation with the detention of the Airbus A330 aircraft highlights the isolation. The Aeroflot aircraft was blocked for several days at Colombo Airport, even despite 100% guarantees from the Sri Lankan government. Such a problem primarily affects aircraft owned by foreign lessors transferred to the Russian register. I am surprised by the unprofessionalism of Aeroflot managers who, in pursuit of profit, failed to calculate all the risks,” the banker wrote.
By the end of March 2022, according to Rosaviatsia, there were five countries that guaranteed Russia the ability to fly freely to their airports: Cuba, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Venezuela and Kyrgyzstan. As for Sri Lanka, September 2022 apologised at the level of its government for the delay of Aeroflot’s A330 and assured that there would be no similar incidents in the future.
The article by Evgeny Kogan, published in June 2022 in Investing.com, is very lengthy and there is no point in quoting all the theses from it because of its tendentiousness. However, it was necessary to answer the two above-mentioned ones in order to show the level of this “expert”. The statements and conclusions made by the investment banker are full of defaults and twisting of facts. At the same time Evgeny Kogan stands up for the truth. In a letter to his grandfather, who died in the war, he writes: “The main thing I decided for myself is not to be ashamed in front of you. Just not to lie.” At the same time, on 9 May 2023, Victory Day became “Remembrance Day” for his grandson. What would his grandfather say to that?
One of the most pressing problems with the current fleet of SSJ100 regional jets is the repair and continued airworthiness of the SaM146 engines.
On May 10, 2023, the same author published an article in a publication with a solid sign in the title, which later told about the mastering of 7,000 metres altitude by the MS-21 aircraft. The article stated that if the repair of the hot part of SaM146 engines is not established, Irkut and ODK estimate that by the end of 2030, only 28 Superjet 100 aircraft out of more than 150 will remain in service. According to some industry experts interviewed by the author of the article, the SSJ100s that have been actively flying since the spring of 2022 will start to “stand up” a year later.
In June, the MashTech telegram channel wrote: “At present, 314 SaM146 engines are installed on 157 aircraft, of which 32 are in a defective state. 15 are repairable, another ten are in the remfond and used for “donation” of spare parts, and seven remained in France. Last year [2022], 46 engines were repaired at ODK-Saturn, compared to 29 repairs in 2021. The one-and-a-half-fold increase is due to an increase in flight hours, and this figure will only grow over time. “ODK-Saturn” has received approval from Rosaviatsia for “repair of the SaM146 gas generator”, which falls under the area of responsibility of the French side, but only by “replacing parts using those dismantled from faulty donor engines.” Now ODK is extending the engines’ service life by 1,000 cycles, which will be enough only for a year of flights, and then there may be problems with repair and maintenance”.
A year has passed. No mass stand-up of Superjets has been noted. At the end of 2023, the programme of import substitution of key components for SaM146 maintenance was completed. Russia mastered the modular repair of one of the most critical components of the power plant – the electronic control unit, and domestic fuel filters were created. Work on repair of the air starter valve was approved for import substitution. In December, delivery of Russian spark plugs to SSJ100 operators began. The aircraft are flying intensively, and the average daily flight hours of Superjets are comparable to those of medium-haul aircraft.
In 2023, airlines cleared some aircraft from dual registration at the expense of funds allocated by the Russian Government. S7 and Ural Airlines reported settling disputes over 45 and 19 aircraft respectively. Aeroflot Group bought 93 aircraft, while eight medium-range Airbus A319s were bought by Far Eastern airline Aurora. In total, Russian airlines bought 165 aircraft from their foreign lessors in 2023 and early 2024. The Government said that the limit of the National Welfare Fund (NWF) in the amount of Rb 300bn allocated for this purpose has been exhausted.
In total, Russian airlines will carry 105.4 million people by the end of 2023, up 10.7 per cent on the previous year, but 5 per cent lower than in 2021. The volume of air passenger traffic exceeded the target value (101.2 million people) by 4 per cent, which was set out in the base scenario of the comprehensive programme for the development of the air transport industry for 2023. It is expected that in 2024 the positive trend will continue, passenger traffic will grow by 8 per cent to the level of 2023 and will amount to about 114 million people. This is stated in the research of the State Transport Leasing Company (STLC).
Yuri Sytnik, Honoured Pilot of Russia and former flight director of Vnukovo Airlines, has made some comments in the Russian information space. In the summer of 2022, he shared with TV channel “360” the opinion that Boeing and Airbus planes that remained in Russia are already “standing without spare parts” as neither Europe, nor the United States, nor China are supplying the necessary components due to sanctions. “More than 700 planes will stand up in two to three months. Everything will stop, because an aircraft without maintenance, without regulations and without parts that exhaust their resource cannot fly,” Sytnik claimed.
The reality is that the bulk of foreign aircraft did not stand up then, by the winter of 2022, and are not parked now. Industry experts say that there are no serious problems with spare parts, but the current mechanism of their delivery to Russia leads to increased costs for carriers and the state. Earlier, ordering spare parts was a simple process, but now, due to sanctions, it requires complex logistics through intermediary companies, which increases the cost of spare parts up to three times. The number of suppliers has increased dramatically from three to 330, mainly from the United Arab Emirates, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. There are plans to expand the geography of supply to other countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.
Spare parts are often not original, but they are not counterfeit either. Some of them are manufactured in China, and Boeing and Airbus officially recognise them. A320 pilot and commander Andrei Litvinov emphasises that control over spare parts in Russia is very strict. If a part or assembly turns out to be counterfeit, it will not be accepted and will not be installed on the aircraft. The airlines also maintain their fleet by reinstalling components and units from non-flying aircraft to operating ones, resorting to cannibalisation of part of their fleet. This is how, for example, one of Yakutia Airlines’ Superjets was restored to airworthiness. According to Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev, Russian airlines will be able to maintain the airworthiness of their fleet for another ten years to enable the Ministry of Industry and Trade to reach the planned rate of production of new domestic aircraft.
Flight safety remains the main issue in the context of sanctions against Russian civil aviation and the simultaneous growth of passenger traffic of domestic carriers. In early December 2023, Newsweek magazine (access from Russia is blocked) conducted a study in which the authors found that the number of air accidents involving passenger aircraft in Russia tripled after the imposition of Western sanctions. IMEMO RAS researcher Alexander Ermakov, in the business magazine Profile, called such a “study” a self-sustaining reaction when “more attention to a topic provokes more publications confirming fears and fuelling interest.”
Rosaviatsia said on this publication that there is no upward trend in the number of aviation incidents in Russian air transport. In the first 11 months of 2023, their number with aircraft carrying passengers and cargo decreased by 1.3 per cent year-on-year to 670 incidents. Of these, the number of incidents involving aircraft and engine failures totalled 400 cases – 2 per cent less than in January-November 2022. FAVT spokesman Artyom Korenyako emphasised that the safety of flights and passengers is a key priority for all air transport workers.
Russia’s civil aviation industry is still heavily dependent on imported equipment and spare parts. But despite this, having been under severe restrictions for two years, the industry has not only not collapsed, but has shown resilience and adaptability. In the next 2-3 years, further recovery of air traffic volumes is expected, and the completion of the Air Transport Organisation and the start of production of MC-21-310, SJ-100, Tu-214 and Il-114-300 will give the industry a powerful impetus for further progressive development.
