The pilots and passengers were in their seats; the planes ready for takeoff. But over 350 flights could not depart on schedule from Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport over two days in June. Aeroflot, Russia's state-owned flagship carrier, which claims to be one of the world's largest airlines, had run out of cabin crews.
This tale was shared on the Telegram channel Aviatorshchina, a Russian airline-industry forum.
And it was not a onetime event.
In late July, a shortage of pilots led to the cancellation of 68 Aeroflot flights out of Sheremetyevo, according to Aviatorshchina. Several other flights were postponed.
RFE/RL confirmed these accounts of unprecedented shortages of pilots and crews with three Russian airline-industry sources, who, like other interviewed sources, requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
"At the peak of the season, when there's enormous demand and people are ready to spend money on tickets, we couldn't handle it," commented a Russian Airbus A320 copilot.
"This is surprising and revealing," the copilot continued. "It's not the first summer (travel peak), and we always managed in the past."
But the situation changed on February 24, 2022, with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two and a half years later, hampered by sanctions that have increased costs and reduced revenues, Aeroflot cannot always find the planes, pilots, and crew it needs to operate efficiently, an investigation by RFE/RL's Russian Service found.
'No One Will Fly More'
As of December 2023, the Russian government had spent 1.09 trillion rubles ($12 billion) since March 2022 to bolster the Russian airline industry with subsidies, loans, domestic-aircraft manufacturing, and the buyback of leased Boeings and Airbuses, according to Russian government data analyzed by Reuters.
But these measures, focused on the short term, have not sufficed to ensure the supply of trained pilots and crews or well-serviced planes, experts say.
When the 2020-21 COVID pandemic and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine cut into air travel, one airline-safety expert said, Russian airlines slashed pilot schedules, including for "expensive," experienced pilots, and reduced or eliminated training on the foreign planes that, according to the latest government data from April 2022, accounted for over two-thirds of Russia's civilian passenger planes.
After Boeing and Airbus curtailed their business with Russian carriers, the government adopted a June 2022 program to supply Russian airlines with 1,036 domestically produced planes by 2030 that prompted companies to switch to training on Russian-made Superjets.
But Aeroflot now says its passenger traffic has increased by 21.4 percent since the first half of 2023 to 25.4 million passengers over the first half of this year, according to the business daily Kommersant.
Yet scheduling cuts and safety limits placed on pilots' and crews' flying time -- 90 hours per month is regulator Rosaviatsia's maximum -- mean that qualified flight teams are in short supply.
"We cannot and do not want to fly more," commented one Aeroflot employee. "And no one will fly more. That's impossible and not acceptable."
"But no one will go to management and tell them, ‘If you don't want to cut flights, you need to hire more pilots,'" the employee added.
'You Can't Do It Alone'
Another challenge is finding adequately serviced planes for any new pilots to fly.
Russia allotted 300 billion rubles ($3.5 billion) from its Sovereign Wealth Fund in 2023 to transfer the leases of 169 aircraft from Western lessors to an agency run by Rosaviatsia, the Interfax news agency reported.
But sanctions that have complicated access to spare parts and skilled repairs mean that often foreign planes go without or rely on the "cannibalization" of parts for maintenance, RFE/RL reported in 2023.
The promised Russian substitutes for these jets have not yet arrived.
The state-controlled United Aircraft Corporation's deliveries of Superjets and MS-21s have been postponed from 2024 until at least 2025.
Some experts doubt the planes will appear even then.
"The global production of airplanes is built on complex international chains of cooperation. You can't do it on the spur of the moment and alone," commented one Russian airline industry source.
That means that now not only are there not enough pilots overall, but "you have pilots for the promised Russian planes who have nothing to fly," the expert said.
'Pay Competitive Salaries'
Those pilots who do have something to fly have not seen their wages indexed for inflation, which is now at 9.13 percent, according to the Central Bank of Russia.
A Russian commercial pilot's salary tops out at 350,000 rubles ($3,800) per month, according to one Russian airline-security specialist. But that's the pay for "the captain of a big Boeing with long work experience and who flies the limit of 90 hours a month," the specialist said. "Everyone else, and they're the majority, receives less."
That maximum salary ranks beneath the lowest annual salary ($50,000) included in a 2024 analysis of worldwide pilot salaries by Simple Flying, an aviation news site.
To find better pay -- and better working conditions, with adequate time for rest and vacation -- both pilots and crews are leaving, industry employees said.
Airlines in the Persian Gulf offer pilots salaries over twice as much as they can earn in Russia, noted the airline-security specialist.
An Aeroflot flight attendant mentioned acquaintances who left Aeroflot and its discount airline Pobeda for the United Arab Emirates' budget carriers FlyDubai and Air Arabia.
"Guys I know are flying in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and a lot of other places," the flight attendant added.
One Aviatorshchina commentator observed that to get pilots to return to Aeroflot, the company needs "to pay them competitive salaries, and that means pay other employees too."
Failing to do so, another commentator added, could mean that Aeroflot could by December run out of pilots who have not used up their maximum yearly quota of 900 flight hours.
The Aeroflot employee cited above believes Russian carriers will hire new pilots to bolster the airline's "efficiency" but whether Aeroflot can afford to do so is uncertain.
Sky-High Costs
In July, Aeroflot announced its first profit since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine -- 42.2 billion rubles ($470 million) for the second quarter of the 2024 financial year, Kommersant reported.
In a July 30 press release, Aeroflot attributed that profit to an increase in demand but conceded its expenses have also increased.
Aeroflot's expenses for fuel, maintenance, repairs, and spare parts have more than tripled since the second quarter of 2023 to nearly 33 billion rubles ($367 million), according to Kommersant.
Russian jet-fuel prices have increased by 30 percent since March 2022, SPIMEX, the St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange, reported.
Over the long term, flights to so-called friendly countries -- China, India, and Turkey, for instance -- cannot compensate for the revenues lost from more profitable long-haul routes to the United States or European Union that disappeared after February 2022, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe reported in April.
And the flyover fees that, before the pandemic, supplied Aeroflot with one-third of its annual pre-tax earnings -- some $500 million to $800 million, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe --have largely vanished.
Higher ticket prices that are up by 25 percent since 2023 to the equivalent of $77 per 1,000 kilometers, according to the news site Vedomosti, cannot make up the difference.
Meanwhile, the government's plans to boost domestic plane production may be reconsidered, Kommersant reported in early August. And the government has no plans to again purchase the leases of additional Western planes, Transportation Minister Roman said in late July, state-run RIA Novosti reported.
"In the current situation, it won't be possible to maintain the flight readiness of Western airplanes for long," commented another airline-security specialist. Without enough flight-ready large airplanes and new aircraft, "even the mid-term outlook," he said, is "bleak."
Aeroflot claims it will use its profits to cover its growing expenses, but it did not include higher salaries for pilots and crews among these outlays.
Even if it opts for a major price hike -- an option downplayed by Transportation Minister Starovoyt in July -- "there will be no money left for higher pilot salaries and improving work conditions," the airline-security specialist warned. "So pilots will continue to flee."
