Putin’s War in Ukraine Hitting Russia’s Civilian Air Travel Especially Hard in Summer Months

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 15 – For the second time this summer, Aeroflot has had to cancel flights because it doesn’t have sufficient staff to man them, just the most visible of the ways in which Putin’s war in Ukraine is hitting civilian air travel in Russia, especially now during the busy summer months.

            But this is just the most visible tip of the iceberg of the problems now hitting Aeroflot and other Russian civilian carriers, Denis Nesterov, a Radio Liberty journalist says; and many of them appear to be beyond the ability of Moscow to compensate for (svoboda.org/a/chernye-lebedi-v-rossiyskom-nebe-voyna-i-grazhdanskaya-aviatsiya/33077198.html).

            As a result, many of the problems Russians now face when they want to travel by air inside their own country or abroad may continue to intensify as long as the war continues, adding yet another reason for Russians to be less supportive of or even being willing to speak out against Putin’s war.

            Among the problems Nesterov points to, the following are especially important:

·       Russia lacks enough pilots and cabin crews to man its aircraft at current summer rates. It has boosted the number of hours pilots work from 80 hours a month to 90 but that hasn’t helped and is a limit beyond which pilots won’t go.

·       Many Russian pilots and cabin crew workers are now seeking employment abroad or in other industries inside the Russian Federation where pay and working conditions are significantly better. And only a quarter of new graduates of Russian pilot schools are going to work for Russian carriers.

·       Aeroflot and other carriers no longer receive the royalties they did from foreign carriers passing through Russian airspace, payments that amounted to as much as 800 million US dollars a year before 1922. The Kremlin has had to compensate by pulling money from its reserves.

·       Many foreign airports are now inaccessible because planes Russian carriers only lease could be seized, forcing the carriers to buy such planes and hope for import substitution in the future; and at the same time, many domestic airports remain closed because they are being used by the military.

·       Airplane fuel has gone up in price by 30 percent since the start of the expanded war in Ukraine, with almost two-thirds of this increase coming since the start of 2024. That is forcing Russian carriers to raise prices and prompting many Russians to seek other means of transport.