In the first eight days of this month, eleven incidents involving passenger aircraft occurred in Russian airspace, including onboard fires, decompression and landing gear problems. This is reported by the Moscow Times. There may be a connection with the fact that Russian aviation has been deprived of spare parts since the beginning of last year as a result of the Western boycott.

The Moscow Times, an independent bilingual newspaper - which has been operating from Amsterdam since 2022 due to censorship - published a list of the incidents.

For example, an Airbus A319 from Rossiya Airlines lost pressure during the flight on Friday, a fire broke out in an Aeroflot Boeing 777 due to a short circuit on Wednesday and the left engine of an Aeroflot Airbus A321 failed on December 2. In these and eight other cases, the pilots managed to land successfully, but the number of incidents is high.

The list also includes problems with Russian-made aircraft.

There may be a connection with the general boycott that Western countries in particular imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Russians have since been deprived of parts in many areas, including aviation. Russian airlines are also no longer allowed to fly to most European airports and therefore mainly operate on domestic routes.

The media in Russia itself barely mentions the situation in aviation, because President Putin's regime rejects all unwelcome reports.

Due to the lack of parts, the Russians have to improvise when maintaining aircraft. They patch up old material or buy counterfeit parts elsewhere, including in China, with all the risks that entails. A former Nordwind Airlines pilot spoke to the British site AviationSource about "Russian roulette" in this regard.

Besides, aviation in Russia was known as one of the most unsafe in the world even before the war in Ukraine.

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* Origin: AVIATION ECHO HQ (2:292/854)