Russian carriers have been able to scrounge enough spare parts to maintain robust domestic service across their vast country.
Since the start of Russia’s war with Ukraine, GA Telesis, a Florida-based aircraft-parts distributor, has been getting a lot of suspicious requests. They’re from shadowy companies formed over the past year in the United Arab Emirates and former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Mindful of sanctions against Russia, GA Telesis asks them for proof that the parts are for a particular airline and plane. When confronted with those questions, company founder Abdol Moabery says, the requests vanish.
“We have a robust compliance department,” Moabery tells Forbes, “but not everybody does.”
When the U.S. and Europe first imposed economic sanctions in the wake of the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine a year ago, aviation experts expected that Russian airlines would be reduced to cannibalizing parts to keep a dwindling number of planes in the air. Despite signs of stress, however, the airlines have proved remarkably resilient in procuring enough parts to keep planes crisscrossing the vast country, which depends on air travel to connect remote communities.
The number of international destinations Russian airlines serve has dropped sharply due to flight bans, but air travel inside the country remains healthy. In February, the number of available seat-kilometers flown inside Russia — a key measure of domestic capacity — was down just 13% from the same month last year, according to data provider OAG. At the same time, domestic passenger numbers increased by about 50,000 to 6.5 million, according to the newspaper Kommersant. In April, Russian airlines have scheduled 2% more available seat-kilometers domestically than a year ago.
RUSSIAN AIRPLANE FLEET, THEN AND NOW
To be sure, Russian planes aren’t inspiring much confidence when it comes to safety. Parts that airlines have been able to scrounge on the black market and by cannibalization are in short supply and it’s taking much longer to get them, says Andrey Patrakov, founder of RunAvia, a Moscow-based firm that makes maintenance and logistics management software. That’s leading to stretched-out maintenance intervals and planes flying with broken parts as long as a backup is functional or a minimum number of required systems are working.
“We have a much better situation than what we expected, but at the same time we’re also seeing an increase of safety risk,” says Patrakov.
Horror stories have attested to the compromises. In late February, a Boeing 737 operated by Rossiya Airlines made an emergency landing after the cabin depressurized. A few weeks earlier, an Azur Air Boeing 767 aborted its takeoff from Phuket, Thailand, after flames erupted from an engine. Nobody was reported hurt in either incident. “I am confident that it has not become more dangerous to fly, and it has nothing to do with the presence or absence of original spare parts,” Alexander Neradko, head of Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s federal air-transport agency, told Russian media earlier this year. “The practice of interchanging serviceable spare parts from jet to jet has always been widespread, even during the Soviet times.”
As of Wednesday, there were 793 large passenger and cargo planes in service in Russia, down by 101 from the middle of February last year, according to the aviation analytics firm Cirium. A large share of the decrease appears to be due to repossession of an estimated 59 of the 483 planes leased to Russian carriers by foreign owners, Cirium says.
Working in Russian airlines’ favor is that many of their planes were parked during the worst of the pandemic, reducing wear and tear. Now, with international flying sharply curtailed, they still have more aircraft than they need. At Russia’s largest airline, Aeroflot, about 20% of its planes are currently parked or in long-term storage, according to Planespotters.net. At some smaller airlines, more than 30% are idled, according to Patrakov. In January, the government legalized transferring parts from those parked planes.
The airlines also benefit from the relative youthfulness and reliability of their Western-built airliners, says John Goglia, a former airline mechanic and ex-member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The 249 Airbus planes Russian airlines still possess are an average of just over 10 years old, according to Cirium, while the 227 Boeing planes average just under 14.
To obtain aircraft parts, Russia is following a playbook written by Iran, a nation under longtime sanctions: work through middlemen who route components through multiple intermediaries to obscure their ultimate destination. Russia is believed to be finding willing partners in former Soviet republics and countries like Turkey, India and China. But it’s costly. With each intermediary taking a cut, prices can be anywhere from two to five times the normal rates, industry sources say, with longer wait times.
Jason Dickstein, a Washington-based aviation lawyer who carries out due diligence for U.S. parts companies, says the normal dynamics of the market aid the Russian efforts to evade sanctions. “If someone says, ‘Hey, I’m a broker and I want to buy from you and I want you to drop-ship it to another broker who’s going to sell it to the airline,’ many people don’t blink an eye at that because that’s the way business has been done for decades.”
Russia has been getting airplanes serviced in some of the countries that still permit its planes to fly there. For the most part it’s being done quietly, says Patrakov, but last month, Rosaviatsiya publicly certified a Dubai-based company, Global Jet Technic, to maintain Russian-owned Boeing 737s and a range of Airbus planes.
After months of U.S. pressure, Turkey last week barred refueling and ground services to Russian-operated Boeing jets. A U.S. Commerce Department official speaking on the condition of anonymity told Forbes the government is warning the former Soviet republics and other countries that aviation companies servicing Russian planes could be hit with U.S. sanctions.
Russia is also starting to manufacture its own parts for Western-built planes. Last year, Rosaviatsiya granted approval to Aeroflot’s maintenance arm, A-Technics, which does work for other airlines, to make cabin and galley components as well as parts in air conditioning and lighting systems, the brakes and the fuselage.
Russian airlines may face more acute problems in finding parts for the homemade Sukhoi Superjet 100 — an 87- to 100-seat regional airliner with about 70% foreign parts — because of the small numbers produced compared with Airbus and Boeing planes, Patrakov says. Russian airlines reportedly are worried that a shortage of U.S.-made sparkplugs could force them to ground many of their 160 Superjets. Work is underway to make the sparkplugs domestically, as well as to develop substitutes for all the foreign content on the plane, including the engines, under a program begun in 2018.
A completely Russian version of the Superjet is a key plank in a government plan to reduce the share of foreign-made planes used by Russian airlines to 20% by 2030.
While newer aircraft may be more reliable, the newest planes, like the A320neo and A350, pose a different problem: the parts come directly from the manufacturer, making them harder to obtain. When things do break, the higher software content makes them harder to fix for the Russians after Boeing and Airbus cut them off from software updates and product support, says Karl Steeves, founder of TrustFlight, a U.K. aviation software company.
Rosaviatsiya is now trying to develop guidelines on how to maintain foreign planes, something the agency previously left to Western regulators, and to certify replacement parts, all without access to engineering and design details. For simple things like tires, that may not be hard, but precision components for engines will be exceedingly difficult to make, says Patrakov.
Engines could be “the brick wall” that the Russian airlines run into, says Moabery. Because of their size, whole engines aren’t easily obtained on the black market, and maintenance is typically done by the manufacturers or a small circle of authorized shops that obtain many of the parts directly from them.
“If this war lasts five years, I don’t see Russia being able to fly Western commercial aircraft because all of the engines will have been burned out,” Moabery says.
With costs up and revenues down, Patrakov expects more Russian airlines to fail — nine reportedly halted flying last year, four of which had their airworthiness certificates revoked. Over time, reliability and safety will become increasingly compromised, he says.
“You can say that the aircraft is safe,” Patrakov says. “You can lie to yourself or the people. But you cannot reverse the flight physics.”
