The Russian aviation sector is officially beginning to suffer from Western sanctions. This is a first in the country: the airline S7 has to lay off staff in Moscow and reduce the number of its connections to and from the Russian capital.
Published on: January 16, 2024 – 9:49 p.m
5 minutes
From our correspondent in Moscow,
The S7 company's wings are not trimmed, but things are going badly: 20% of its fleet of around a hundred aircraft are now grounded. More precisely, the A 320 and the A 321 neo. The cause was difficulties with their engines.
“PW1000G engines have operational problems; Last summer, the manufacturer recalled more than a thousand engines of this model, reports the newspaper RBK. Airlines in Europe and the United States have been forced to cancel flights and at least 57 airlines have stopped using planes with these engines. However, in such situations, companies can contact the manufacturer anywhere in the world.
Impossible in Russia. And for good reason: Since the sanctions came into force in 2022, there are no more spare parts, no more maintenance, no more external technical inspections and no new Western devices can be sold there. For almost two years, every flight with a Boeing or Airbus from a Russian company has been a risk, at least on paper. Reparations via “friendly countries,” as they say in Russia, may indeed not be enough.
Also read: Moscow authorizes its airlines To aircraft rented abroad in Russia
No incident has been publicly reported on S7 flights, which have so far served all major cities, but the company still had to learn serious lessons from this situation. According to Russian media, the company will lay off 15% of its staff in Moscow and invite certain other employees to move to its major centers in the East: Irkutsk or Novosibirsk, where it plans to concentrate and strengthen its activities.
This is a return to the starting point. Historically, S7 (S for “Siberia”) is a branch of the Soviet Aeroflot. In the early 2000s, the company expanded nationwide and became Russia's largest private aviation company. “Pilots can retrain on another type of aircraft, particularly the Embraer 170, and continue to work for the company. In addition, based on our recommendations, some pilots and flight attendants are leaving the company to work for other, including international airlines,” the airline told the RBK newspaper.
Against layoffs in other companies?
Russian airlines Aeroflot and Pobeda have already stated that they are ready to hire flight attendants licensed by the S7 company. However, experts interviewed by Kommersant newspaper speculate: the staff cuts at S7 could be followed by layoffs at other major airlines, as air transport volumes in Russia are still 18% lower than before the pandemic. Passenger traffic in the Russian Federation at that time averaged 128 million people.
The decline is visible at airports: many shops are now closed due to a lack of customers. And Russian aircraft production does not promise a quick solution to the problem. At the beginning of 2022, Prime Minister Mikhail Michoustin set a goal of having 30% national aircraft in Russian companies by 2030. This is not a given: last April, the Association of Major Russian Airlines (AEVT) said it was “concerned”. ” by “the schedule” considered too slow for national production.
Flights on the ground
In 2023, Russia recorded 180 cases of aircraft failures, according to Newsweek. This is three times more than before the sanctions came into force. Few are known or cause great anxiety, but in private conversations anecdotes about breakdowns and flight delays, sometimes lasting hours, are increasingly emerging. Several of them have made headlines in recent months. Last August, passengers on a Red Wings flight were stranded in Yekaterinburg in the Urals for 24 hours because “technical malfunctions” were discovered on the two aircraft available for the flight to Turkey.
In a press release, the company acknowledged difficulties due to “external sanctions” and “limitations in the supply of spare parts that complicate aircraft maintenance.” Also in August, a Pegas Fly aircraft was delayed in Thailand due to a faulty weather monitoring system. At the beginning of October, the national airline Aeroflot experienced three technical failures on its aircraft in one day.
As the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin boast about opposing the West's punitive measures since Russia's attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the aviation sector appears to be increasingly affected. A sector that is nevertheless crucial in the world's largest country, which spans 11 time zones. This fall, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted that he had no solution in sight: “We are facing new challenges and are looking for new ways to solve them.”
Read alsoRussian Far East: Fewer flights within Primorye due to sanctions