Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in its airlines being banned from flying into European, American and Canadian airspace, leaving the country with leased planes it can’t use and destroying partnerships with the West in the aerospace industry.
According to aviation analysts, Russian citizens will not be flying to Europe or North America anytime soon, and even flights to friendly countries such as China are questionable due to the international community’s ostracism of the country’s aviation sector.
“Russia will become the world’s largest advanced economy and an aviation industry no better than North Korea,” Richard Aboulafia, managing director of Michigan-based AeroDynamic Advisory, told Al Jazeera.
“Aviation sanctions are easy to enforce,” said Abulafia, who has more than 30 years of experience in the aviation industry. “Airlines cannot fly. They will have to completely redesign their planes, which are currently being built using Western technology.”
Eurocontrol says it has suspended 300 flights per day of Russian carriers to Europe and 50 flights per day of European airlines to Russian airports. Russia responded with mutual restrictions to any country that banned its flights.
“It will become increasingly difficult for Russians to travel for two reasons,” Sash Tusa, aerospace and defense analyst at Agency Partners LLP in London, told Al Jazeera. “Firstly, Russian airspace is closed to Western aircraft. In addition, international travel is becoming extremely difficult as support for Western airlines in Russia is being discontinued.”
Boeing and Airbus cut off access to spare parts for their aircraft to Russian airlines [File: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg]
Boeing and Airbus, Russia’s main suppliers of commercial aircraft, have cut off Russian airlines from access to spare parts for their aircraft. Boeing also closed its design center in Moscow and temporarily closed its office in Kyiv.
It could be weeks or months before airlines run out of spare parts. Airlines can extend flights by shutting down some aircraft and dismantling them for spare parts for use on aircraft that are still flying, although this practice is prohibited by the terms of leases that apply to commercial aircraft.
Like most commercial aircraft today, Russian airlines’ aircraft are mostly owned by leasing companies in the West. In accordance with European sanctions, leasing companies must terminate contracts with Russian carriers by March 28. Several leasing firms, including Irish AerCap, global player #1, confirmed that they had written to their Russian clients asking them to return their planes.
Ulik McEwaddy, founder of aircraft leasing company Omega Air, called the task of returning hundreds of aircraft from Russia in such a short timeframe “mission impossible” due to the possibility of legal problems and a ban on Russian aircraft from flying in European airspace.
The Cape Town Convention, aimed at preventing an airline from escaping with a plane, has not been tested in court since it was signed in 2001. Three out of every four passenger and cargo aircraft on Russian flights today are owned by Boeing or Airbus, which supply more than 300 aircraft each. According to the aviation analytical company Cirium, a total of 136 Russian-made aircraft are operated by Russian airlines.
“What are the chances that they could be seized?” Abulafia said.
How long Russian aviation remains in decline will depend not only on how long the war in Ukraine lasts, but also on how long it takes to rehabilitate the Russian state in the eyes of the West.
Tusa predicts that the gap in relations between Russia and the West will last for years, calling it “more serious than others in the post-war period.”
Abulalfiya said the war in Ukraine could also make buyers of Russian-made military jets like India, the biggest buyer of MiG and Sukhoi fighters, think twice before buying more.
Risk tolerance
Security considerations may also hinder the development of Russian aviation.
Henry Wilkinson, founder of the London-based security and intelligence company Dragonfly, said he has received a huge amount of inquiries from airlines since the start of the war in Ukraine.
In 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian Buk missile while flying over part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian rebels, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board. This tragedy is likely to be of paramount importance to airlines flying to Europe during the crisis.
“The information they need from us depends on the airline,” Wilkinson told Al Jazeera.
“Airlines approach risk differently and also receive different levels of information. American airlines are obviously very well supported by the FAA, but airlines in other countries don’t get much information from their local governments. Currently, airlines are trying to find safe and efficient corridors linking Europe with Asia.”
Airlines generally bypass Russian and Ukrainian airspace. Flights from Europe to Asia that would normally have flown over Ukraine and Russia have been diverted south to skies over Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan.
Eurocontrol, the agency that sets air traffic policy in the European Union, has reported serious disruptions on major routes. Flights between Frankfurt and Beijing are now two hours longer than before, and flights between Helsinki and Tokyo take up to five additional hours.
Stephen Furlong, senior equity analyst at Davy Capital Markets in Dublin, Ireland, said European airlines have not been hit too hard by the disruption so far.
“Before the Ukrainian crisis, Lufthansa only had about two percent of flights to Russia and less than one percent to China and Japan,” Furlong told Al Jazeera, explaining that European airlines have yet to return many flights to Asia that were canceled during the pandemic. pandemic.
Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine has triggered sanctions targeting a number of sectors of the Russian economy, including aviation. [File: Oleksandr Lapshyn/Reuters]
Cooperation between the West and Russia in space could also suffer.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Ukrainian, American and European space operations have been halted or completely destroyed by the war,” Craig Kowalt, a former correspondent for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, told Al Jazeera.
These projects include mission-critical operations to resupply the International Space Station, the launch of the OneWeb satellite Internet service designed to compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink program, and the ExoMars European rover being built by British Aerospace.
“All of these projects have been in development for at least a decade and have involved thousands of Ukrainian and European engineers,” Kowalt said.
Affected Ukrainian projects include the Antares launch vehicle, which launches the Northrop Grumman Cygnus space station to resupply the spacecraft from Wallops Island in Virginia. It lifts about half of the cargo needed for the space station, while Elon Musk’s Space X carries the rest.
Meanwhile, the Russian space agency said it would no longer service the RD-180 rocket engines used by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed. These launch vehicles are used to deliver top-secret U.S. national defense payloads into space for the Pentagon.