Russian airlines are struggling to maintain their jets under the weight of Western sanctions

A 4-year-old Airbus A320 operated by the Russian airline S7 was flying from the Siberian city of Bratsk to Moscow on January 9, when it encountered a problem: Its toilet system malfunctioned. The flight was forced to divert to the city of Kazan for an unscheduled landing.

Four days earlier, a Red Wings airline passenger jet flying from Kazan to Yekaterinburg also was forced to turn around and returned to its departure airport after its landing gear failed to retract.

Two months before that, a top transport official in the Pacific coast region of Primorye sent a letter to the ministry for the development of the Far East and Arctic in Moscow: We need new passenger planes because our current planes won’t be able to fly anymore after this year.

The reason, according to the letter obtained by the news outlet RBK? The plane’s Canadian-built Pratt & Whitney engines couldn’t be repaired due to Western sanctions.

Since the beginning of 2023, Russian airlines have reported at least seven incidents in which flights were disrupted, delayed, or canceled, according to Russian media. While a couple incidents were blamed on human error, most were mechanical in nature.

Nearly one year after Russia invaded Ukraine last February, turning a simmering regional conflict into the largest land war in Europe since World War II, cracks are showing in Russian aviation industry.

Russian airlines are struggling under the weight of Western sanctions that have all but cut off the already struggling industry from badly needed imported parts.

At least nine Russian airlines stopped flying in 2022, according to the newspaper Kommersant — four of them after the national aviation regulator, Rosaviatsiya, pulled their airworthiness certificates.

Experts say Russian airlines have for months turned to “cannibalization” to maintain and perform upkeep on their fleets, which range from small Canadian DHC-6 turboprops used by the Far Eastern regional carrier Aurora to the flagship national carrier Aeroflot, which flies Boeings and Airbuses, as well as Russian-built Tupolevs and Irkuts.

In November, the Telegram channel Baza reported that Aeroflot had cannibalized 25 planes for parts, and another 18 aircraft were under maintenance and awaiting repairs. In December, the Russian government finally legalized the practice of cannibalization.

While mechanical failures are expected in aircraft over time, a rapid increase in fleetwide mechanical failures may indicate that something fundamental has changed.” RAND Corporation report

“‘Cannibalism’ has indeed been used for a long time, but as a forced practice and not on a large scale. And in our situation, it becomes the only way to somehow replace the missing parts,” Andrei Patrakov, the founder of the flight safety company RunAvia, told RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities. “The obvious disadvantage of this practice is that cannibalization leads to a reduction in the aircraft fleet. No one can deny that it solves the problem of lack of spare parts only for a while.”

Other airline manufacturers have started tweaking maintenance regulations to accommodate the lack of replacement parts.

In December, a widely read aviation channel on Telegram reported that a state-owned aircraft engine company had recommended that dirty fuel filters used on SuperJet 100 aircraft be cleaned with brake fluid instead of being replaced with new ones.

The SuperJet 100 is a short-haul regional aircraft built by state aviation giant Sukhoi that has seen repeated difficulties since being rolled out in 2008, in an effort to revitalize the domestic airline manufacturing industry.

A month earlier, in November, Yakutia Airlines reportedly had cannibalized so many parts from two SuperJet 100 planes in its four-plane fleet that the state leasing company from which the company obtained the planes took them back.

The business newspaper Vedomosti reported in November that 80 percent of the airline’s overall fleet – which includes more than 20 Western- and Russian-made aircraft — was out of commission due to maintenance and cannibalization issues.

The paper also cited a case that predated Western sanctions: In 2020, cockpit glass needed to be replaced in one aircraft, but instead of letting the manufacturer do it, workers did it themselves — and neglected to install plugs, which resulted in the cockpit flooding.

A report published in November by the U.S. think tank RAND Corporation found at least six crashes involving Russian civilian and military aircraft in the two months prior. Four were fighter jets, two were not, the report found.

“While mechanical failures are expected in aircraft over time, a rapid increase in fleetwide mechanical failures may indicate that something fundamental has changed,” the report said. “Sanctions placed on Russia by the West could well be affecting Russia’s ability to manufacture and maintain parts needed to keep aircraft safe.”

‘High Priority’
As Western sanctions have bitten into the overall economy, and specific sectors like the aviation industry, authorities have tried to come up with ways to find badly needed parts — like those needed to keep civilian airliners in the air.

Not long after the February 24 invasion, the national Transport Ministry released a draft, eight-year plan for developing domestic airlines. The proposal said obtaining spare parts and maintenance supplies was a “high priority.”

When components begin to arrive that the aircraft developer has never heard of and didn’t approve of, made in some workshop near Tehran, then technical risks may arise.” Aviation expert Andrei Kramarenko

In early May, the government issued new regulations that broadened the ability of airlines to use spare parts in servicing their aircraft. Previously, carriers could only use parts with documentation provided by European, Canadian, or U.S. regulators.

In July, Russia signed a memorandum of understanding to buy aircraft spare parts from Iran, which has struggled under Western sanctions for years.

In December, according to Izvestia, the government formally legalized the practice of cannibalization, even though it was already in widespread use.

The sheer number of government decrees issued on the subject, Patrakov said, demonstrated “desperation.”

“When it became clear that even if you allow the installation of original spare parts, but with documents from third countries, then this is not enough,” he said. Russian regulators “then took an even more desperate step: They allowed non-original spare parts, even with documentation from third countries, including Iran.”

But cannibalization is a common practice for airlines around the world, said Roman Gusarov, editor in chief of the industry newsletter Avia.ru. He said Russian regulators had updated national rules governing the practice as a result of Western sanctions.

“All airlines in the world are engaged in removing spare parts from some aircraft and rearranging them to others,” Gusarov said.

“Nothing new is happening. We’re only correcting our legislation by not allowing any such special dispensation,” he said. “This is not carte blanche for dismantling aircraft, but a tool for managing your assets. Missing spare parts can be removed from an aircraft that’s not yet flying.”

Still, Trade Minister Denis Manturov said regulators were trying to avoid “total cannibalization” of aircraft for spare parts.

Over The Horizon
Given Russia’s vast landscape, air travel remains the only economical — and practical — way to travel long distances between towns, cities, and regions.

The country does has an extensive railway network. For many, however, that’s not realistic — for example, if you live in the Siberian city of Irkutsk and you have business in Moscow, which is a four-day journey by train.

In Primorye, problems with the regional carrier had already forced it to cut its flights in half, Yevgeny Timonov, the deputy regional transport minister told RBK. He said Mi-8 helicopters would be put into service to reach distant settlements that previously had relied on Aurora Airlines.

“The Russian aviation industry was lucky in a certain sense: By 2022, it came up with a large surplus in the fleet,” said Andrei Kramarenko, an expert at the Institute for Transport Economics and Transport Policy at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. That’s due to the economic lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which sharply reduced air traffic and, thus, wear and tear on aircraft and parts, he said.

Still, he said one of the problems of the evolving makeshift system for maintaining Russia’s air fleets is the danger of counterfeit parts.

“If spare parts are used, but with resources and with a verifiable history, that’s also no big deal,” he said. “We take a plane somewhere in Bolivia, Uganda, or [Burma], disassemble it, remove the necessary components, carefully pack it up and deliver it.

“But when components begin to arrive that the aircraft developer has never heard of and didn’t approve of, made in some workshop near Tehran, then technical risks may arise,” he said.

Patrakov drew an analogy to the restaurant industry, and McDonald’s, which was one of several Western fast-food chains that pulled out of Russia following the imposition of Western sanctions.

“While [McDonald’s] restaurants worked on the franchise model in Russia, everything was fine,” he said. “But when management passed to Russian owners, everything changed from the very get-go. You go to the toilet — there’s not enough soap, the floor is dirty. This has happened before, of course, but much less frequently. So what’s the problem?”

“It seems that the people remained the same, the specialists who used to work there before,” he said. “The equipment is the same, the coffee machines. Even the standards seem to be the same, although they were somehow rewritten. What’s changed?” rferl.org