airlines cancel flights due to reduction of subsidies for flights bypassing Moscow – Kommersant

The Russian government has cut funding for a regional transportation program flying around Moscow from RUB 9 billion to around RUB 7.5 billion, sources say. Izvestia. This caused the cancellation of flights, most of all in the Omsk and Tyumen regions, Tatarstan, St. Petersburg, Dagestan and North Ossetia.

In 2022, 9 billion rubles were also allocated to the program, but part of the funds was reallocated to other purposes. As a result, regional flights were subsidized by 7.8 billion rubles. The airlines carried 2.7 million passengers under the program compared to 2.85 million in 2021. At the same time, the share of flights bypassing Moscow reached for the first time 50%.

The reduction in spending in 2023 is due to the “sequestration of state budget expenditures,” Izvestia’s interlocutors said. The Ministry of Transport is said to have been instructed to cut overall spending by 5%, resulting in a 17% cut in program size. One of the newspaper’s sources believes that the Federal Air Transport Agency approached the issue formally. “Those routes for which airlines have not yet concluded agreements on co-financing flights with regional authorities have been removed from the program. At the same time, the budget process is structured differently in different regions,” he explained. The Federal Air Transport Agency declined to comment.

Nordwind Airlines announced that it had canceled flight programs on the Nizhny Novgorod-Petrozavodsk and Kemerovo-Chita routes due to “a review of the decision of the Federal Air Transport Agency to subsidize these lines.” The carrier also planned to operate flights to Vladikavkaz from Ufa and Samara, but the decision to provide subsidies was “delayed”.

According to Kommersant, air carriers in April turned to the Ministry of Transport with a request to provide three new state support measures. The first is to extend the subsidies provided for SSJ 100 operators to new Tu-214s. The second is to co-finance the replacement of the engines of the Superjets produced before 2022 with domestically produced PD-8s. The third is to cancel the requirement to provide bank and state guarantees when buying and leasing new aircraft.

More details – in the material “Kommersant” “Money from the sky”.

Leonid Uvarchev