Russia’s business aviation sector is struggling to source and operate viable aircraft in the wake of international sanctions imposed more than 18 months ago. According to numerous Russian media reports, the shortage has intensified in recent months, prompting the industry to repurpose aging Soviet-era airliners into private jets, mainly to meet the needs of corporate flight departments.
Large Russian state-backed corporations, such as Gazprom, Rosneft, and Rostec, have operated large fleets of largely Western-made business aircraft, serving the extensive travel needs of their top managers. Now, due to sanctions covering the provision of maintenance services and parts, they have found it hard to keep these in service, and harder still to replace aircraft.
According to a recent report of the Russian Kommersant business newspaper, the space agency Roscosmos and energy group Gazprom are looking to restore dismantled Tupolev Tu-204s. According to industry analysts’ estimates, the cost of converting the 200-seater jets into VIP transports will run up to around $40 million and would presumably involve airframes fitted with older Russian Perm PS-90 engines as opposed to more recent PS-90A2 turbofans that Pratt & Whitney developed with Perm.
A spokesman for Roscosmos, which needs to fly personnel to and from its rocket launch sites, is looking to buy preowned Tu-204 and later Tu-214 airliners. Some companies are also considering conversions of the larger Ilyushin Il-96 airliner.
Russian companies now have no way to legitimately and directly acquire Western business aircraft. However, according to Dmitry Petrochenko, with Russia’s BizavNews platform, sourcing imported aircraft via intermediaries is “difficult, but realistic.”
At face value, aircraft like the Tu-204 are poor substitutes for North American large-cabin, long-range alternatives, due in part to their requirement to have three pilots, while burning a lot of fuel and needing longer runways. However, sanctions apart, Russia’s weakening ruble currency is another reason companies are having to confine their aircraft shopping to the domestic preowned market and scrap heap.
Meanwhile, the sanctions are starting to bite even harder. At the end of August, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued even more specific lists of sanctions, targeting individual Russian aircraft operators, including Meridian Air, North-West, Premier Avia, and RusJet.
The aim is to make it even harder for these companies to maintain their fleets. While flights to Kremlin-friendly countries will likely not stop, legal experts believe the new edicts could pave the way to more aircraft being impounded outside Russia, as has already happened with some jets owned by Russian oligarchs. Potentially, the new list could induce airports in countries that have remained open to Russian visitors, such as the UAE, to refuse to allow sanctioned aircraft to land.