Three incidents with civil planes occur in Russia in one day

Three planes of the Aeroflot air company broke down in Russia on 2 October.

Source: The Moscow Times

A Boeing-777 was not able to fly to Phuket from Moscow due to damaged chassis. The flight was cancelled. The passengers were redirected to other flights.

Aeroflot shifted responsibility for this incident to the land services employees of the airport of Thailand. The employees of the airport of Phuket had allegedly damaged landing gear during the preparation for take-off.

But on the same day, 400 passengers headed to Türkiye got stuck due to a breakdown of another Aeroflot plane in Moscow. There were two attempts to fly them to Antalya. The first board urgently returned to the departure airport due to an engine fire.

The second plane also turned out to be broken: it was being repaired for an hour and a half without letting the passengers leave, but the attempt to repair the aeroplane was unsuccessful.

The Moscow Times stressed that the planes of the Russian air companies have begun to break down two times more frequently, mainly during flight. From January to August 2023 there were 120 such incidents compared to the average of 55 incidents in the same time in the last five years.

The engines (30% of cases) and chassis (25% of cases) of the planes break down most frequently. The problems with breaks, flaps, conditioning systems and windshields also occur (3-6% of cases for each problem mentioned).

Out of 817 foreign planes owned by Russian air companies as of April 2022, at least 72 (9%) have broken down at least once and then been repaired by uncertified services with the use of components of unknown origin. The cannibalisation of other planes may have become one of the sources of the problem. By January 2023, 25-30% of the park had been disassembled for parts.

Background: Last week in Russia there were claims about the unprofessionalism of civil pilots who were then given a month to retrain.

Russian air companies fly mainly Airbus and Boeing planes which were banned from doing business in Russia. Over 40% of these planes belonged to foreign leasing companies which did not get their property back after the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The majority of planes continue to fly, though they were cut off from important software and maintenance updates necessary to guarantee their airworthiness.

Now, the malfunction of planes is being kept a secret in Russia.

The Russian air company Aeroflot released an internal order, according to which senior flight attendants must enter the data about technical failures and equipment malfunction into the Cabin Log Book only after coordinating it with the commander of the plane. This practice is also wide-spread in other air companies.

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