The Ministry of Transport warned of the risks of reducing the number of flights to China by 70%

Passenger air travel between Russia and China may be reduced by 60-70% compared to pre-pandemic 2019. This was stated in a letter from Deputy Transport Minister Valentin Ivanov to Opora Rossii President Alexander Kalinin dated February 16, transmits RBC.

According to Ivanov’s forecasts, in 2023 the volume of air transportation between Russia and China may reach 0.9-1.2 million passengers, while in 2019 the passenger traffic was about 3 million people. Such a risk is due to the fact that China has not provided guarantees that it will not detain Russian aircraft at the request of other countries due to sanctions, as well as dual-registration aircraft.

As Gleb Kinder, vice-president of Opora Rossii, noted, if air communication between countries is made accessible, including from Russian regions, then passenger traffic can increase to 5 million people. Now only “Aeroflot”, from Irkutsk and Khabarovsk to Harbin – IrAero and Aurora, respectively. Kinder emphasized that this is “extremely small.”

After the lifting of coronavirus restrictions in China, Russian airlines decided to increase their presence in this direction, but faced problems due to Western sanctions. In particular, after the introduction of sanctions, air carriers began to register imported aircraft in Russian jurisdiction, but not all of them managed to remove them from the foreign register, as a result of which many aircraft ended up with double registration. China has not allowed such aircraft into its airspace since May 2022. Now 480 Russian aircraft are still not excluded from the Bermuda registry.