Passenger planes are in critical condition: Russia is “cannibalizing” even cargo Boeings

Earlier, the Russians began demanding that sanctions be eased due to a shortage of spare parts for aircraft.

Russian passenger airlines will receive cargo planes for dismantling for spare parts for the first time, Kommersant reports .

According to the Russians themselves, the cargo airline Volga-Dnepr will transfer eight of its Boeing cargo planes to Aeroflot. These are six Boeing 737s and two Boeing 747s.

The deal is worth about $130 million. The market is evaluating the acquisition of Aeroflot as “extremely profitable.”

According to a source close to Aeroflot, the aircraft will be transferred for financial leasing to the group’s companies, called Rossiya and Pobeda. The transfer of the aircraft is expected in the near future.

Market experts do not believe in the potential cargo use of these aircraft by the aforementioned carriers.

They consider it much more appropriate to use spare parts from these sides in the interests of their own fleet.

“The economic efficiency of the deal is that purchasing the same amount of components will be many times more expensive,” says one of them.

It should be noted that from 2006 to the end of 2009, Aeroflot operated a subsidiary operator with a fleet of wide-body cargo aircraft – Aeroflot Cargo (declared bankrupt in 2010), after which the carrier focused on passenger transportation.

Experts doubt that the group will return to the cargo aircraft business, since in the conditions of stagnation of the cargo transportation market in Russia there is no need for additional aircraft.

Experts also consider the conversion of aircraft into passenger aircraft to be unfeasible due to the high cost of research and development work. Thus, experts see the most rational use of aircraft as spare parts donors.Read also:

Russian civil aviation crisis

Experts believe that due to the sanctions imposed, passenger aircraft in the Russian Federation are in terrible condition. The lack of new fuselages and Western spare parts leads to accidents and disasters.

As previously reported, in the first 11 months of last year, there were 208 aviation incidents – a quarter more than in 2023. Almost every second case is associated with engine failure or chassis failure.

Russia is trying to build its own passenger aircraft , but to date, almost all attempts have been unsuccessful. UNIAN previously reported that Russia has built 15 times fewer airliners than it planned.

In February 2024, it became known that the Russians’ flagship project, the MS-21 airliner, would begin to be supplied to Russian airlines no earlier than 2025-2026. This is despite the fact that earlier serial production of the aircraft was supposed to begin in 2016.

(C)UNIAN 2025