Level of civilian flight danger in Russia triples, and 35% of aircraft dismantled – Ukrainian intelligence

Defence Intelligence of Ukraine has reported that Russia’s civil aviation sector is on the verge of collapse due to sanctions in 2023. Ukrainian intelligence managed to gain access to Federal Air Transport Agency’s (Rosaviatsiya) official documents.

Source: Defence Intelligence of Ukraine

Quote: “As a result of a successful complex special operation in cyberspace, a large volume of classified official documents of the structural unit of the Russian Ministry of Transport, the Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia), was obtained.” 

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Details: The data obtained includes a list of Rosaviatsia’s daily reports for the entire Russian Federation for more than a year and a half.

Defence Intelligence believes that Russia’s civil aviation sector is on the verge of collapse.

An analysis of the nature of aircraft incidents from the documents obtained indicates that a number of failures, especially those related to engines, landing gear and wing mechanics, have become systemic.

Defence Intelligence assumes this is a direct consequence of the sanctions against Russia:

• a ban on the supply of aircraft and spare parts for them;
• a complete ban on maintenance and services;
• a ban on the update of software;
• detention of Russian aircraft abroad;
• restriction of access to meteorological information for air navigation.

At the moment, Russia is trying to conceal a number of problems with their civil aviation by all means.

In particular, based on the information received, Ukrainian intelligence has identified 10 facts that indicate technical problems with Russian civil aviation:

1. In January 2023, 185 accidents were recorded in Russian civil aviation. About a third of them were classified as incidents of varying levels of danger. The leader here was the Russian short-haul “Sukhoi Superjet” aircraft, with 34 problematic incidents.
2. In the first 9 months of 2023, 150 cases of aircraft malfunctions were documented in Russia. Over the same period in 2022, 50 such incidents were recorded. This means that the flight risk in Russia has tripled.
3. The most problematic areas of Russian aviation are engines and landing gear, as well as other important elements such as hydraulic systems, flaps and software.
4. The Russian Federation has serious difficulties in maintaining its aircraft with large flight times. Due to a lack of capacity and specialists, Moscow is trying to reorient aircraft maintenance to Iran, where the relevant work is carried out on a “handicraft” basis, that is, without appropriate certification.
5. As of March 2022, Russia had about 820 foreign-made civilian aircraft. And while at that time only up to 10% of them had undergone uncertified repairs using non-authentic spare parts, today almost 70% of the fleet has been subjected to such “service”.
6. The acute shortage of spare parts has led to the so-called “aviation cannibalism”, where some aircraft are dismantled to repair others. According to the available data, by mid-2023, more than 35% of aircraft in the Russian Federation were dismantled to “donate” their spare parts to other jets.
7. Most of the Soviet An-2 aircraft are currently unable to get off the ground, as their engines were manufactured in Poland, but their supply has been suspended due to sanctions.
8. In January 2023 alone, 19 different failures were recorded among the 220 Airbus aircraft in Russia. In particular, 9 planes used by Aeroflot recorded 17 cases of smoke.
9. Of the 230 Boeing aircraft used in Russia, 33 technical failures of various aircraft systems were recorded.
10. Every seventh Brazilian-made Embraer plane failed to meet the conditions of Russian operation, and there are 21 of them in Russia.

In addition, in September 2022, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) marked Russia in red, along with Liberia and Bhutan, which indicates an extremely high risk to flight safety.

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