LONDON – Aeroflot’s operational flight movement statistics continue to fall further as the Ukraine Crisis continues, according to data from RadarBox.com.

Around two weeks ago, AviationSource reported that these particular statistics dropped 20% compared to the same period last year. They have dropped further.

So without further ado, let’s get into the numbers…

The Numbers Currently…

For October 15-22, the carrier’s numbers dropped nearly 25% to 379 movements, which is down from the 505 recorded back in the same period of 2021.

This means that the carrier is around 433 movements from meeting the pre-pandemic level of 812 movements based on the seven-day rolling average.

Below is a list of the last four weeks’ worth of data:

Based on 2021’s numbers, you can see that the movement decrease was gradual, as the airline was more than likely preparing for a quieter Winter.

However, for 2022’s numbers, the sudden drop from nearly 10% to 22% happened right at the beginning of October, which shows that some level of disruption has been caused as more sanctions bite.

Rosaviatsia Hopeful Of 100m+ Passengers in 2023…

Despite sanctions hitting the region hard, Rosaviatsia believes that Russian carriers could carry up to 103 million passengers in 2023.

The Russian regulator believes that 91.1 million of this will be handled on domestic routes, whilst 10.1 million will be on the limited international network that such carriers have already.

Expanding more on this was Vladimir Poteshkin, the Deputy Head of the Federal Agency for Air Transport (Rosaviatsia):

“The planned amount of funds to be allocated from the federal budget to implement the subsidy program [in 2023] will be kept at the level of this year – that’s approximately 27.5 billion rubles. […] In a similar vein, there are plans to extend the subsidy program for Russian airlines to perform domestic, including local, carriage within the framework of government resolution No. 761 in 2023,”

“The government support measures enumerated will contribute to achieving the carriage figures for 2023; as has already been saying, traffic volumes have already been determined for up to 2030 in the strategy, and accordingly, the plan for 2023 is 103 million passengers”.

Passenger traffic dropped has dropped 10% so far this year, with Rosaviatsia predicting that around 100 million passengers will be handled by the end of the year.

However, pre-COVID & pre-Ukraine, around 128 million passengers were handled, so you can definitely see the drop that has occurred because of the conflict.

Overall…

It remains clear that Aeroflot is certainly on some form of a decline, especially as we enter a winter of discontent that will affect Russian spending power.

This, of course, has been exacerbated by the continued crisis in Ukraine, including Putin’s partial mobilization to further help his own war effort.

Such a volatile winter period is going to be interesting to watch, especially in Russia, as airlines continue to struggle with a lack of parts for maintenance and more.

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