Izvestia: airlines canceled part of flights across Russia due to cuts in subsidies

Airlines have started to cancel domestic flights due to cuts in government support. This year, subsidies for the program for the implementation of regional flights bypassing Moscow have been reduced from 9 billion to 7.5 billion rubles, write “News”.

As the newspaper notes, in 2022, 9 billion rubles were also allocated for this program, but then Rosaviatsia redistributed part of the funds for other purposes. As a result, state support for this direction amounted to 7.8 billion rubles, with its help the airlines transported 2.7 million passengers after 2.85 million a year earlier.

The further reduction of the program is connected with the sequestration of state budget expenditures, the interlocutors of the newspaper pointed out: the Ministry of Transport was instructed to cut costs by 5%. According to one of them, the Federal Air Transport Agency approached the issue “formally”, removing from the program those routes for which carriers have not yet concluded agreements on co-financing flights with regional authorities (flights are partially financed from the federal budget, partially from regional ones).

At the same time, the budget process in the regions is arranged differently, so some routes were signed only at the beginning of summer, he noted. As a result, most of the flights excluded from the program fell on the Omsk and Tyumen regions, Tatarstan, St. Petersburg, Dagestan and North Ossetia.

After the cuts in the program, airlines began to cancel scheduled flights. So, Nordwind Airlines canceled flight programs on the routes Nizhny Novgorod – Petrozavodsk and Kemerovo – Chita, and Rossiya canceled two weekly flights from St. Petersburg to Tobolsk. Smartavia said that they are not canceling flights announced in the summer schedule, while other companies declined to comment.

How wrote On May 3, Vedomosti reduced subsidies to airports in southern Russia closed due to a special operation. According to one of the sources, almost 2.5 billion rubles have been agreed to be allocated to 11 closed airports. for the past Q1 2023 from the government reserve fund. Last year, about 7.5 billion rubles were allocated to support them.

The closure of airports, some of which serve popular tourist destinations, had a negative impact on air travel in the country. The Ministry of Transport estimated the passenger traffic due to this in 2022 at 19.1 million people. In total, domestic airlines carried 95 million passengers last year. The plan for passenger traffic in 2023 is 101 million people, Minister of Transport Vitaly Savelyev said at the end of March 2023.