During two days in June, more than 350 flights could not depart from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport according to the schedule. Aeroflot, the Russian state carrier that is aiming to become one of the world’s largest airlines, has run out of crews, RFE/RL writes.
This story was shared on the Telegram channel Aviatorshchina, a forum for the Russian airline industry. And this was not a one-time event.
At the end of July, 68 Aeroflot flights from Sheremetyevo were canceled due to a lack of pilots, Aviatorshchina reports. Several other flights were delayed.
RFE/RL confirmed these accounts of the unprecedented shortage of pilots and crews by three sources in the Russian airline industry who, like others interviewed, requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.
“At the height of the season, when there is huge demand and people are willing to spend money on tickets, we couldn’t handle it,” commented one Russian Airbus A320 pilot.
“It’s surprising and shows a lot,” the pilot continued. “This isn’t the first summer (peak travel) and we’ve always managed in the past.”
However, the situation changed in 2022. on February 24, when Russia fully invaded Ukraine. After two-and-a-half years, hampered by sanctions that have increased costs and reduced revenue, Aeroflot can’t always find the planes, pilots and crew it needs to operate efficiently, an investigation by RFE/RL’s Russia Service has found.
“No One Will Fly Anymore”
According to Russian government data analyzed by Reuters, the Russian government from 2022 in March spent 1.09 trillion rubles (11 billion euros) to support Russia’s airline industry through subsidies, loans, domestic aircraft production and buyouts of Boeing and Airbus leases.
But these measures, focused on the short term, have not been enough to ensure a supply of trained pilots and crews or well-maintained planes, experts say.
When 2020-21 The COVID pandemic and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine have reduced air travel, according to one airline safety expert, with Russian airlines reducing the schedules of pilots, including “expensive” experienced pilots, and reducing or eliminating training on foreign planes.
They, according to the latest government data, in 2022. in April accounted for more than two-thirds of Russian civil passenger aircraft.
After Boeing and Airbus restricted their activities with Russian carriers, the government in 2022 in June adopted a program according to which by 2030 Russian airlines are due to receive 1,036 domestically produced planes, prompting the companies to switch to training with Russian-made Superjets.
But now Aeroflot says that from 2023 in the first half of the year, its passenger flow increased by 21.4 percent. and reached 25.4 million in the first half of this year. passengers, writes the Kommersant business daily.
But reduced schedules and safety restrictions on pilot and crew flying time – 90 hours a month is the maximum set by regulator Rosaviatsia – mean there is a shortage of qualified flight crews.
“We can’t and don’t want to fly anymore,” commented one Aeroflot employee. – And no one will fly again. This is impossible and unacceptable.”
“But no one is going to come to management and tell them, ‘If you don’t want to cut flights, you have to hire more pilots,'” the employee added.
“You Can’t Do It Alone”
Another challenge is finding well-maintained aircraft for new pilots to fly.
The Interfax news agency reported that Russia will use its State Property Fund in 2023. allocated 300 billion rubles (3 billion euros) for leasing 169 planes from Western lessors to the agency managed by Rosaviatija.
However, due to sanctions that have made it difficult to obtain spare parts and qualified repairs, foreign planes are often left without maintenance or depend on the “cannibalization” of parts. reported RFE/RL.
There are no promised Russian replacements for these planes yet.
State-controlled United Aviation Corporation’s Superjet and MS-21 deliveries have been delayed from 2024. at least until 2025
Some experts doubt the planes will show up even then.
“Global aircraft production is based on complex chains of international cooperation. It cannot be done instantaneously and individually,” commented one Russian airline industry source.
This means that now there is not only a general lack of pilots, but also “you have pilots for the promised Russian planes that have nothing to fly,” the expert said.
“Pay competitive wages”
The salaries of those pilots who have something to fly have not been indexed to inflation, which currently stands at 9.13 percent, according to Russia’s central bank.
According to one Russian airline security specialist, the salary of a Russian commercial airline pilot is 350,000 rubles. rubles (about 3.4 thousand euros) per month. But that’s the salary of a “big Boeing captain with a lot of work experience and flying no more than 90 hours a month,” the specialist said. “Everyone else, and there are most of them, gets less.”
This maximum salary is below the lowest annual salary (€45,000) listed in aviation news site Simple Flying’s 2024 annual salary. analysis of world pilot salaries.
Industry workers said both pilots and crews are leaving their jobs in search of better pay and better working conditions, and to get enough time for rest and vacations.
Gulf airlines are offering pilots twice the salaries they can earn in Russia, an airline security specialist has noted.
One Aeroflot flight attendant mentioned acquaintances who had moved from Aeroflot and its low-cost carrier Pobeda to work for the United Arab Emirates’ low-cost carriers FlyDubai and Air Arabia.
“My friends fly in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and many other places,” added the flight attendant.
One Aviatorshchina commentator noted that to encourage pilots to return to Aeroflot, the company needs to “pay them competitive wages, which means paying other workers as well.”
Another commenter added that failure to do so could mean that by December Aeroflot could run out of pilots who have not used their maximum annual quota of 900 hours of flying hours.
The Aeroflot employee in question believes that Russian airlines will hire new pilots to increase the airline’s “efficiency”, but it is unclear whether Aeroflot will be able to afford it.
Space costs
In July, Aeroflot posted its first profit since 2022. Russian invasion of Ukraine – 42.2 billion rubles (about 420 million euros) in the second quarter of the 2024 financial year, Kommersant reported.
July 30 in a press release, Aeroflot attributed the gain to increased demand, but admitted that its costs had also increased.
According to Kommersant, Aeroflot’s expenses for fuel, maintenance, repairs and spare parts from 2023 increased more than threefold to almost 33 billion in the second quarter. rubles (330 million euros).
Russian jet fuel prices from 2022 increased by 30 percent in March, reported the St. Petersburg International Commodity Exchange SPIMEX.
In the long run, flights to so-called friendly countries such as China, India and Turkey cannot compensate for the revenue lost from more profitable long-haul routes to the United States or the European Union, which will no longer exist after 2022. “Novaya Gazeta Europe” newspaper wrote in February and April.
And taxes for flights, which before the pandemic provided Aeroflot with a third of its annual pre-tax profit – about 500-800 million. dollars, according to “Novaya Gazeta Europe” – essentially disappeared.
Increased ticket prices, which from 2023 increased by 25 percent and, according to the news website Vedomosti, at 77 US dollars (69 euros) per 1,000 kilometers, cannot compensate for this difference.
Meanwhile, the government’s plans to increase domestic aircraft production may be reconsidered, Kommersant wrote in early August. And the government does not plan to buy additional Western planes on lease again, Minister of Transport Roman said at the end of July, state-run RIA Novosti reported.
“In the current situation, it will not be possible to maintain the flight readiness of Western planes for a long time,” commented another airline security specialist.
Without enough air-ready large planes and new aircraft, “even the medium-term outlook” is “bleak,” he said.
Aeroflot says it will use its profits to cover rising costs, but has not included higher salaries for pilots and crew.
Even if it decides to sharply increase prices (this possibility was downplayed by the Minister of Transport J. Starovojs in July), “there will be no money left for higher salaries of pilots and improvement of working conditions,” warned an airline security specialist. “So the pilots will continue to run.”
Parengta pagal RFE/RL inf.
2024-09-08 13:57:16