Flying High

On Friday, August 16, 2019, Ural Airlines Flight 178 departed Moscow’s recently opened Zhukovsky International Airport at 6:12 AM, destined for Simferopol, Crimea with 226 passengers and seven crew members on board. Less than two minutes into the flight, the 41-year-old captain, Damir Yusupov, and his 23-year-old co-pilot, Georgy Murzin, informed the control tower that the Airbus 321’s left engine had failed. Upon receiving permission to return to the airport for an emergency landing, they discovered that a flock of birds had also knocked out the plane’s remaining engine, and they lacked the altitude to make it back to the runway.

Drawing on his emergency landing trainings in a flight simulator at Ural Airlines, Yusupov decided to stop the fuel supply to the engines and glide the jet onto a nearby cornfield without lowering the plane’s undercarriage.* After the plane skidded to a stop, passengers and crew were evacuated via escape slides and told to move away from the aircraft as quickly as possible. Everyone aboard survived the ordeal, with only one passenger requiring a hospital stay. Yusupov and Murzin were hailed as national heroes in the media, performing “Moscow’s miracle on the Hudson” (a refence to Captain Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles’ 2009 landing of a commercial A320 on the Hudson River after engine failure caused by an impact with a flock of birds).

Both pilots were bestowed the nation’s highest honor, Hero of Russia, in a ceremony at the Kremlin the following November. Yusupov underplayed his role in remarks to the press: “I really don’t feel like a hero. I did what I had to do, saved the plane, the passengers, the crew.”

Sadly, this was one of few aviation safety incidents in Russia’s recent history to end well. Passengers in May of the same year flying on Aeroflot 1492 were not so lucky. The plane was bound for Murmansk and suffered an electrical failure after being struck by lighting after departure from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. The Russian-built Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash-landed and burst into flames after returning to the airport’s runway, killing 41 of the 78 people aboard.

In terms of gross statistics, the US and Russia occupy first and second place among nations with the highest number of civilian aviation fatalities since 1945 at 10,822 and 8,414 (from 861 and 529 incidents), respectively. And both nations have had comparatively high accident rates per million departures in recent years – at 3-4 times the world average. Yet Russia has been under particular scrutiny since the fall of the Soviet Union due to the high number of accidents involving gross pilot negligence, with one 1994 crash over Siberia resulting in the deaths of all 75 persons aboard after the pilot put his 12-year-old son at the controls.

In 2011, the Aviation Safety Network named Russia the world’s deadliest place to fly (beating out the Democratic Republic of Congo) after pilot error resulted in the deaths of all but one of 45 people aboard a flight in Yaroslavl carrying an entire hockey team in the country’s top league. A subsequent investigation found the pilots had accidentally applied the brakes during takeoff after earlier forging documents to fly an aircraft for which they hadn’t received training.

Then-President Dmitry Medvedev slammed the country’s poor aviation safety record and called for an overhaul of regulations. Three years later, after the death of Total CEO Christophe de Margerie at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, when his jet collided with a possibly intoxicated snowplow driver, an analysis of statistics found that flying in the country was still four times as dangerous as the world average.

Growing Pains

Headline-grabbing catastrophes aside, flying in Russia has become far safer than in earlier times. Russian carriers’ passenger numbers have grown from a nadir of 21.5 million in 1999 to 128.1 million in 2019 (a six-fold increase). And there has been a concurrent drop – punctuated by occasional tragic spikes – in civilian aviation fatalities from 200-300 annually in the early 1990s to 43 in 2019.

Oleg Panteleyev, Chief Editor of the leading Russian aviation news agency aviaport.ru, agreed that pilot error has been responsible for most of the accidents that have occurred (this is also true worldwide). “Over the last 30 years, the Soviet system of air safety was changed to a Western one,” he said. “This transition didn’t always go smoothly. Growing pains will always happen.”

Following a 2013 disaster in Kazan caused by a lack of skill on the part of the pilots, the Russian government sought to address the “cadre problem” by taking the unprecedented step of allowing airlines to hire foreign pilots. Aeroflot hired its first German pilot in 2014 and the company soon had around 20 non-Russian pilots on staff. However, this was soon outweighed by economic and geopolitical realities: following a major drop in the price of oil and international sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian ruble plummeted in value from around 30 to a dollar to less than half of that. This meant local carriers could no longer offer competitive salaries, and soon over 300 Russian pilots had relocated abroad, largely to booming Asian markets.

“In the last year, the problem of pilots relocating abroad has become irrelevant for obvious reasons,” said Alexei Sinitsky, R&D Director at Infomost Consulting, which provides market services to clients in the aerospace sector. “Regardless, flying has become much safer in recent years, especially due to Russia adopting the International Civil Aviation Organization-recommended Global Aviation Safety Plan,” which harmonizes safety standards across borders.

Panteleyev is optimistic that new technologies and a generational change among pilots are improving the country’s safety record: “Modern planes have much more effective systems for preventing errors,” he explained, “and that means any actions on the part of the pilots that would inhibit safety will be automatically blocked. Pilots are also much less inclined to ignore warnings and automated instructions lest they be disciplined upon analysis of the plane’s data.”

“Pilots don’t fly in the same teams as they did in Soviet times,” he added. “Today, a pilot might not know who his co-pilot will be until right before a flight. This means there’s less inclination to deviate from official guidelines in favor of personal understandings. You don’t have an older guy telling his colleagues ‘rules are for the weak and I’m going to do it my way’ anymore.”

“There will always be issues to keep an eye on,” Sinitsky added, “but aviation safety in Russia isn’t in a critical situation at all.”

“The number of major accidents has certainly gone down,” Panteleyev said, “but it’s still not as safe to fly in Russia as in Western Europe or the United States.” Panteleyev advised anyone concerned about flying in Russia to choose a larger, more reputable carrier. “Large Russian airlines are members of the International Air Transport Association (IATA)," he said. "Their main criteria for members is safety. This means the Russian carriers pass exactly the same kind of annual safety audit as a member airline in the United States.” Top carrier Aeroflot (a SkyTeam member) prides itself on having one of the youngest fleets of any major carrier worldwide.

A New Generation of Jets

At the height of the pandemic, in May of last year, the 200th Sukhoi Superjet regional airplane took to the air after final assembly was completed in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in Russia’s Far East. The plane debuted in 2011 on Armenia’s national carrier, Armavia, and has since been adopted by Ireland’s CityJet and Mexico’s second largest airline, Interjet. It could be spotted at the San Antonio International and Houston George Bush Intercontinental airports completing flights to Mexico as the only Russian-made commercial plane flying in the United States.

However, the project was plagued by problems from the get-go. “The official picture painted of the Superjet soaring toward the global market was certainly attractive, and ultimately, this idealized public image was the plane’s downfall,” wrote Anastasia Dagaeva, licensed pilot and aviation expert for the Carnegie Center Moscow. “Behind the facade — as with all aviation innovations — was a less appealing story of malfunctions, missed deadlines, defective parts, and engine shortages.”

Safety questions arose after a Sukhoi Superjet crashed into a volcano during a 2012 airshow in Indonesia. Originally designed as a Russian-assembled jet consisting largely of Western components, with Boeing officially advising on everything from certification and management to marketing, and Italy’s Alenia Aeronautica owning a 25 percent stake in the project, the airplane never made its intended breakthrough on Western markets. Cityjet returned its fleet within a few years and Interjet reportedly had to cannibalize some of its Superjets to keep the remainder flying, due to a lack of spare parts. Following geopolitical tensions in 2014, Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC, the airplane’s producer) has made localizing production of key components – including the avionics and engine – a priority.

“If you want to have a globally successful commercial airplane, you have to invest large sums into a vast support network around the world, service centers and personnel,” Panteleyev explained. “[UAC] spent a lot of money developing the jet, but skimped on after-sales support – and it showed.” Panteleyev insisted that most of these problems have been addressed, and spare parts are more readily available to any carrier flying the Sukhoi Superjet, but it’s unclear if the damage already done to the plane’s reputation can be overcome internationally.

Ironically, the same ruble devaluation that made Russian pilots seek more lucrative contracts abroad also made Russian planes – including the Sukhoi Superjet – more competitive financially. The only Russian airline to remain profitable throughout the 2020 pandemic year and actually increase its passenger traffic, Rostov-on-Don based budget carrier Azimuth, flies exclusively Sukhoi Superjets. The pandemic (and generous state subsidies) has thus made Russian carriers that have avoided flying Sukhoi Superjets, such as the country’s second largest airline, Siberia-based S7, look with increasing interest to domestically-produced planes. Panteleyev sees the Sukhoi Superjet’s future in meeting growing domestic demand, combined with a re-emphasis on markets where Russia has traditionally had more commercial leverage, including the post-Soviet space, among carriers having to survive under increasingly thin profit margins.

An even more ambitious project is the MS-21 single-aisle airliner, which is set to compete directly with the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 aircraft families. With an orderbook of over 300 units (175 of them already paid for), UAC’s MS-21 assembly lines are booked out for the first four years of production by mostly Russian carriers. After several delays, the plane is expected to receive certification in Russia this year and hit the skies in 2022 or later. Unlike its Boeing and Airbus competitors, the MS-21’s wings are made entirely of composite materials – giving it a considerable advantage in fuel efficiency over its rivals. It also has the widest fuselage diameter among narrow-body aircraft: at 4.06 meters, it’s 30 cm (11.8 inches) wider than the Boeing 737.

“I’m optimistic about the MS-21,” said Panteleyev. “According to the manufacturer's statements, this is the best mid-range jet in the world. The major question is what it will be like as a commercial product, what kind of support package the producer will offer its clients.” Industry experts hope that UAC has learned the lessons of providing adequate after-sales support from the Sukhoi Superjet project.

Russia’s production of commercial airliners has recovered from a nadir of five in 1996 to several dozen in recent years (still shy of the hundreds of Boeing 737s produced in Everett, Washington every year). For all of its flaws, the Sukhoi Superjet did become the first Russian commercial aircraft to successfully enter Western markets, giving it a considerably better fate than Japan’s Mitsubishi SpaceJet (a similar aircraft designed at the same time that has yet to fly commercially).

In addition to the Sukhoi Superjet and MS-21, UAC has revived and modernized two airplane models from the late Soviet era: the Il-114 twin-engine turboprop regional jet and the Il-96 long-haul wide-body airliner. All told, by the end of the decade Russia may return to its Soviet peak of producing 150-200 civilian aircraft each year, especially if military and government interest in the latter two projects is taken into account. If the MS-21 launches next year with the Russian-made PD-14 turbofan engine as expected (instead of the Pratt & Whitney PW1400G, as originally designed), Russia will be among only four countries (along with the US, UK and France) capable of independently producing such aviation components from scratch.

“The prospects for Russia’s aviation industry are rather modest,” said Sinitsky. “But they’re definitely there. You can’t really separate politics from economics in this case.”

Finally, a long-range commercial jumbo jet called the CR929, under joint development with China, is not expected to debut until much later in the decade. So while the Tu-154, workhorse of Soviet civilian aviation, may have made its final commercial flight last year, passengers of Russian airlines may soon see a revival in domestically-produced aircraft taking to the skies alongside the Boeing and Airbus models that dominated global markets at the start of this century.

The Price is Right

Lost among the cacophony of air disaster, sanctions and pandemic headlines has been the major positive story obvious to any air traveler in Russia: the country’s airports. Russia’s booming airline traffic has been accompanied by a major expansion of infrastructure: in 1999, the federal budget allocated around $60 million for transportation. By 2020, this figure was over $15 billion, with $3.5 billion earmarked for regional airport development during 2019-2024. Often infrastructure development occurred as a prelude to one of the major international sporting events that Russia has hosted in the last decade, including the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and 2018 World Cup, which was hosted by 11 cities.

“We’re experiencing nothing short of a renaissance of Russian airports,” Panteleyev said. New terminals have sprung up across all 11 of the country’s time zones: from its European enclave of Kaliningrad to Vladivostok in the Far East. “Passengers are increasingly demanding more in terms of amenities: from skybridges and baggage systems to higher-end restaurants and supermarkets. I think American and European travelers will be pleasantly surprised.”

Federal investments have often been overshadowed by a private sector eager to take advantage of booming times. Billionaire Roman Trotsenko’s Novaport is the largest airport holding in Russia, with 14 regional airports and serving an estimated 16-17 million passengers annually, followed by Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element (15.3 million) and Viktor Vekselberg’s Airports of Regions (11.8 million). The government is hoping to attract no less than $1.3 billion annually in private financing for airport development in coming years. “Right now, private investors into Russian airports can get their money back in 5-6 years,” Panteleyev said. “You don’t have profitability like that in the US or Europe.”

Rostov’s Platov (commissioned in 2017) and Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Terminal B (2019) airports have won UK-based Skytrax’s prestigious five-star rating for quality. The consultancy noted Platov’s speedy immigration arrival and departure procedures, extensive children’s facilities, local and international food choices, and “appealing art and interactive features focusing on the famous local Cossacks.” Sheremetyevo, meanwhile, has been named one of the world’s ten best airports among those serving 40-50 million passengers annually.

The combined passenger air traffic of Moscow’s four international airports surpassed 100 million in 2019, making it the second largest hub in Europe, after London, and seventh in the world (ahead of Chicago, Dallas/Fort-Worth and Dubai). Yet the government has made redirecting the country’s heavily Moscow-centric air traffic a priority: its current transportation strategy calls for increasing the share of non-Moscow traffic nationally from 37 percent to 51 percent by 2024, via investments and subsidies.

A part of this strategy has included establishing a series of regional air hubs and low-cost airlines across the vast country. Budget carrier Azimuth Airlines has been offering domestic and international tickets for as little as $12 from Rostov’s Platov Airport since 2017. Since launching in 2014, Aeroflot-owned Pobeda Airlines has blossomed into one of Europe’s fastest-growing airlines, thanks to its expanding network, no-frills policy, and similarly competitive prices. State-backed Red Wings is due to offer significant competition to privately-owned Ural Airlines in Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport beginning this year. Meanwhile, privately-owned S7 is advising on a major renovation of its hub, Tolmachevo in Novosibirsk, to make connections shorter, while Khabarovsk and Vladivostok are competing to be the country’s largest air hub in the Far East.

Vnukovo is due to become Moscow’s first airport with a metro connection by 2022, potentially giving the budget traveler in Moscow an opportunity to get to the Black Sea resort of Sochi for the same price as a taxi ride in Moscow ($30).

“Not to be too cynical,” Panteleyev added with a chuckle, “but your chances of dying in an airline accident are miniscule compared to a car crash, to say nothing of coronavirus. So just fly and enjoy!”