Looming change

The Russian government and aviation regulators appear to have firmly set their sights on radically overhauling the country’s air transport market. The official reasons given are a recent string of airline bankruptcies and a number of air crashes reported lately. However, the true motives behind the new policy remain unclear.

The drive to cut the numbers of medium- and small-sized airlines has been very much in evidence in the recent months. The original explanation offered was that such carriers are financially insecure. The folding of the Continent airline this July came in very handy to prove this thesis. Based at Moscow’s Vnukovo, Krasnoyarsk’s Yemelyanovo, and Norilsk’s Alykel airports, the carrier’s fleet was built around 11 Tupolev Tu-154M airliners previously owned by Aeroflot. Continent tried its hand at multi-sector services between Russia’s eastern and southern regions via Moscow but eventually went bust over a relatively small debt of 32 mln rubles (just over $1 mln at the current exchange rate).

This bankruptcy brought about two seemingly contradicting proposals: to set up an emergency reserve fund that would ensure that a bankrupt airline’s passengers would be picked up by other carriers (starting next year, there will be no more money earmarked in the federal budget for reimbursing such passengers); and to toughen the airline certification requirements, so that compliant operators would grow some fat and stop going belly-up. The latter idea, among other things, implies raising the minimum required number of similar-capacity and -range aircraft in an airline’s fleet.