Flying on Russian planes is about to get much more dangerous

“Within a year Russia will cease to have any kind of viable airline industry,” said Richard Aboulafia, managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory. He said the country’s airline industry could soon find itself somewhere between the heavily sanctioned industries in Iran and North Korea.

Airlines crucial to Russia’s economy

That poses a serious problem for Russia’s overall economic activity.

Russia is the world’s largest nation by landmass, more than twice the size of the continental United States. It needs to have a viable airline industry to keep its economy working, Lichfield said.

“Russians don’t fly as much as Americans do. They don’t fly to Siberia for vacation,” he said. But the airline industry is a crucial link for businesses, not only for international flights, but also for domestic service for its energy sector, due to the need to transport engineers, other workers and equipment to and from its far flung oil fields.

“It is an important part of Russia’s economy. They need that backbone. They need some basic domestic [airline] industry to remain in place,” Lichfield said.

Russian airlines’ domestic operations are a fraction of the size of the domestic operations of the US airline industry, with about 7% of the number of flights last year, according to Circium data. But unlike the US industry, it had fully recovered from the pandemic and actually flew 8% more domestic flights in 2021 than it did in 2019, while US domestic flights still trailed the 2019 total by 22%.

With blows to the Russian economy from the myriad sanctions mounting, it is inevitable that its economy won’t require all those flights in 2022, or likely for years to come. But the loss of essential parts and the possibility of aircrafts being repossessed means Russia’s…