On December 8, passengers of S7 Airlines heard loud noises as their Boeing 737 took off from Novosibirsk for Moscow, as the plane's two engines roared and caught fire, Russian media reported.
On the same day, a Russian Airlines Airbus A319, bound for St. Petersburg, lost cabin pressure and began falling from the sky shortly after take-off from Mineralnye Vody. Russian Telegram channels reported that the pilots made an emergency landing, and a video clip from inside the cabin showed passengers screaming and crying while oxygen masks spread from the ceiling.
Russian media reported that a UTair plane made an emergency landing on December 11 due to a malfunction in its wing flap while carrying 104 passengers and 42 pounds of radioactive material. A UTair plane en route from Moscow to Kogalym in the Khanty-Mansi region of Siberia declared an emergency due to engine failure on December 29.
Also in December, Russia's main airline, Aeroflot, experienced a series of emergencies: an Airbus A321 with a left engine failure; Another Airbus 321 had an air conditioning problem; Two Boeing 737 aircraft with landing gear failure; Boeing 737 with wing flap failure; The Boeing 777 had smoke in the cabin due to an electrical short. Multiple other failures led to long delays and stranded passengers.
Other airlines have experienced severe engine vibrations, sudden engine shutdowns, and failures in hydraulic systems, wing flaps, steering systems, autopilot, and oil filters, among other problems.
Following President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western countries imposed sanctions on Russian aviation, banning the transfer of technology and spare parts, as well as servicing, insurance or software updates for Russia's large fleet of Western aircraft.
More than a year ago, in September 2022, the International Civil Aviation Organization red-flagged Russian aviation, citing significant concerns about the country's ability to keep its aircraft safe.
However, Russian aviation officials have adopted an “all is well” slogan, insisting that the sanctions do not affect safety and, in some cases, denying media reports about an increase in air accidents.
“Logistics chains are available to domestic airlines, thanks to which they receive spare parts and components required for the normal operation of aircraft,” Mikhail Vasilenkov, the Federal Air Transport Agency, said in a statement in December.
The agency reported 400 civil aviation accidents due to serious equipment failures from January to November last year, claiming that was good news due to a 2 percent decrease from the same period in 2022, the first year of the sanctions.
But in an opinion piece published in leading newspaper Kommersant in December, Oleg Panteleev, director of Aviaport, a Russian aviation research centre, said the risks had “increased significantly”, adding that there had been a sharp decline in technical inspections.
Some Russian aviation analysts have joined the government in seeking to reduce the growing risk, while others say it is only a matter of time before a major catastrophe occurs.
“Of course the sanctions affect aviation safety,” Russian aviation analyst Andrei Minshinin said in an interview. “They can't influence him.” But he said Russian airlines have mitigated their impact by importing spare parts and even completely refurbished engines via Central Asia, Turkey, Singapore, Iran and other countries. “The question is, what is the cost? This costs a lot.”
Minshinin added, “The aviation safety situation in Russian aviation is much better than expected and much better than expected at the beginning of 2022.” However, he acknowledged that in some cases Russian pilots were under extreme pressure, facing life-or-death decisions when equipment failed.
Andrei Batrakov, an independent Russian aviation safety expert and president of RunAvia, a company specializing in drone and aircraft safety, said in an interview that Russian authorities allow airlines to use parts beyond their service life, leading to mid-air breakdowns.
Batrakov said he feared retaliation from Russian authorities for discussing the risks but felt compelled to speak out.
He said: “I am independent and my motivation is to provide safety, and when I talk about all the problems, my idea is not to worry people, but for the sake of safety.” “Sometimes Russian government organizations or state-owned companies do not think about these problems. But sometimes this is a very big air safety problem and some people may die in the end. My mission is to save these people.”
Despite horrific incidents depicted in news reports and in real-time cellphone videos and photos posted by passengers on social media, Russians continue to fly. Despite the tough sanctions, Russian aviation has not collapsed – even though Western aircraft account for 95% of passenger flights, and new Russian planes mainly use Western components.
The events of December were not unusual.
In October, 10 frightened passengers insisted on disembarking after a Russian-made Sukhoi Superjet stalled while en route to the runway, according to eyewitnesses and news reports. They said the captain told passengers he had restarted the plane and everything was fine.
In September, the pilots of Ural Airlines Flight 1383, an Airbus 320 bound for Omsk in Siberia from Sochi in southern Russia, diverted to an airport with a longer path due to a hydraulic failure. When the plane ran out of fuel, the pilots landed in a field.
There were no medals. Instead, pilots were attacked by experts and colleagues for endangering passengers' lives by flying farther to reach the longer runway, because many other failures could have occurred while they were in the air. The 20-year-old plane will be dismantled into parts and deployed.
In 2022, Russian authorities issued developer certificates allowing 100 companies, including seven airlines, to modify parts and perform non-standard maintenance to keep planes flying.
But in November, Russian airline Pobeda's developer certificate was suspended over serious violations in modifications to three Boeing planes, including modifications to the traffic collision avoidance system, according to the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia.
Last May, Russian investigative newspaper Proekt reported on sources that airlines were discouraging crews from recording crashes.
“Russian air safety was a complete disaster” even before the sanctions were imposed, said Batrakov, the analyst who fears retaliation. He added that many aircraft now need the necessary maintenance, “but this has not been done because the parts are not available due to sanctions.”
Planes continue to fly with defective parts — for example, with cracks — long after they are replaced, he said, warning that “you can extend all you want, but you can't extend the laws of physics.”
“If you have a component with a crack inside, you have some buffer time to replace it, say 10 days, but not three to four times that, because it has a physical limit,” Batrakov continued. “The question is when will it reach criticality when this part is completely broken, and this part can lead to a catastrophic event?”
Even before the war, the Russian-made Sukhoi Superjet, with a French-made engine and 70 percent foreign parts, was responsible for dozens of serious air accidents. But such incidents increased after the imposition of sanctions, according to analysts, because reaching parts of Sukhoi is much more difficult than with Boeing or Airbus planes.
In November, Andrei Boginsky, head of Yakovlev, the maker of the Superjet, told aircraft operators at a meeting in St. Petersburg that Russia could only repair 178 of the plane's 903 imported parts.
A Superjet flight from Vladivostok to Chita in October was the main case: upon takeoff, passengers felt a strong knock, and the plane was forced to turn around, burn fuel and make an emergency landing due to a problem with the left engine.
The next day, a replacement Superjet stalled while en route to the runway, prompting the 10 angry passengers to bail. The plane took off – after the pilot announced he had restarted it – but did not reach Chita. The flight was forced to land in Khabarovsk due to a hydraulic failure.
Natalia Abakumova in Riga, Latvia contributed to this report.
