Russian airlines are struggling under the weight of Western sanctions that have all but cut off the already struggling industry from badly needed imported parts.Īt least nine Russian airlines stopped flying in 2022, according to the newspaper Kommersant - four of them after the national aviation regulator, Rosaviatsiya, pulled their airworthiness certificates.Įxperts say Russian airlines have for months turned to "cannibalization" to maintain and perform upkeep on their fleets, which range from small Canadian DHC-6 turboprops used by the Far Eastern regional carrier Aurora to the flagship national carrier Aeroflot, which flies Boeings and Airbuses, as well as Russian-built Tupolevs and Irkuts. Nearly one year after Russia invaded Ukraine last February, turning a simmering regional conflict into the largest land war in Europe since World War II, cracks are showing in Russian aviation industry.Ī plane is serviced at the Domodedovo aircraft maintenance center near Moscow. While a couple incidents were blamed on human error, most were mechanical in nature. Since the beginning of 2023, Russian airlines have reported at least seven incidents in which flights were disrupted, delayed, or canceled, according to Russian media. The reason, according to the letter obtained by the news outlet RBK? The plane’s Canadian-built Pratt & Whitney engines couldn’t be repaired due to Western sanctions. Two months before that, a top transport official in the Pacific coast region of Primorye sent a letter to the ministry for the development of the Far East and Arctic in Moscow: We need new passenger planes because our current planes won’t be able to fly anymore after this year.
The flight was forced to divert to the city of Kazan for an unscheduled landing.įour days earlier, a Red Wings airline passenger jet flying from Kazan to Yekaterinburg also was forced to turn around and returned to its departure airport after its landing gear failed to retract. On January 9, a 4-year-old Airbus A320 operated by the Russian airline S7 was flying from the Siberian city of Bratsk to Moscow when it encountered a problem: Its toilet system malfunctioned.
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