Minus nine overboard – Newspaper Kommersant No. 10 (7455) dated 01/20/2023

Nine airlines have suspended flights in Russia in 2022. In four of them, the Federal Air Transport Agency suspended the main document – the operator’s certificate. Over the previous five years, there were five cases of suspension of the work of carriers, which ended in the cancellation of the main document. Experts say that players in the cargo, charter and business segments are expected to leave the market, noting that the position of large passenger airlines looks stable so far.

In 2022, nine Russian airlines stopped flights. The air operator certificates of four of them have been suspended, according to the register of the Federal Air Transport Agency, and another one, issued to the bankrupt Skol airline, was canceled. In the previous five years (2017-2021), Rosaviatsia suspended and then canceled the certificates of five airlines – these are Buryat Airlines, Pioneer Regional Airlines, Pskov Avia, Saratov Airlines and VIM-Avia.

Three certificates were stopped in 2022 directly due to sanctions – according to the carriers themselves. Yes, two Boeing 747s. skygates, which occupied the third place in terms of cargo transportation in the Russian Federation, are now operated in Azerbaijan by the affiliated Silk Way West Airlines. The certificate was suspended at the request of the company in March. In May, they announced they would stop working. “Kamchatka”which the US manufacturer refused to supply three Cessna Grand Caravan aircraft.

Could not start transporting St. Petersburg “Swift”, owned by a native of the large Belgorod farming network “Green Valley” Alexander Evtukhov. Under the FlyFast brand, the company planned to fly on Hawker Beechcraft jets, but in November 2022, the Federal Air Transport Agency suspended the certificate due to a lack of aircraft.

Belonged until 2022 to Russian Helicopters “Rostvertol Avia” in 2010, she received a certificate for passenger and cargo transportation on the Mi-2, but by the autumn she applied for a suspension, left with the only helicopter. “The project did not take off initially, the problems were exacerbated by difficulties with spare parts,” explains Kommersant’s interlocutor close to Rostec. According to another source in Rostec, at the end of 2022 the company was sold to a private owner.

Bankrupt airline certificate “Skol” from Kaliningrad was canceled in 2022, but back in mid-2021, the Federal Air Transport Agency banned it from operating 30 helicopters and five light-engine L-410s due to debts to STLC.

Other carriers that have suspended flights due to sanctions are Coral Travel-related charter company Royal Flight, business operator Sirius Aero, and two freight carriers belonging to Volga-Dnepr, Atran and AirBridgeCargo. As long as they keep their air operator certificates.

The departure of a number of players in the cargo and business segments was expected, given the sanctions, said Ilya Shatilin, editor-in-chief of the frequentflyers.ru portal. Royal Flight, which is associated with Turkish tour operators and has kept only two aircraft in the Russian Federation, is unlikely to be able to return to the market, the expert believes. In his opinion, it is also difficult to predict the stability of companies that have survived 2022: a difficult situation remains for players cut off from foreign markets due to dual registration of aircraft. So, the expert explains, the iFly business model seemed stable until the moment when it was cut off from the way to Egypt.

The position of large companies due to large-scale support through subsidies at the same time looks quite strong. According to Shatilin, SSJ-100 operators may be at risk if the problems with the shortage of SaM-146 engines in the replacement pool and the repair of their hot part, for which the French Safran was responsible, are not resolved.

The departure of large participants in the foreseeable future is hardly expected, adds a Kommersant source in the expert community: “The Russian market is already quite dense.” He recalls that in the early 2000s there were more than 300 commercial airlines in the Russian Federation, now there are 114 in the register, while two-thirds of the passenger traffic is provided by the top 5 players. He believes that in the future, the official exit from the market of companies that have already stopped, as well as small regional carriers, which “will have to be liquidated or go under the wing of larger competitors,” is expected.

Aigul Abdullina