Air Transport

Russian authorities are to focus on letting domestic operators further import aircraft rather than open up its domestic market to foreign air carriers as a means to tackling a current squeeze in capacity.

Speaking at hearings in the lower house of Russia’s parliament and asked to assess the current lack of modern passenger fleet, transport minister Igor Levitin estimated it as “huge”.

While acknowledging opportunities arising from arrangements under open skies agreements, he ruled them out as a way to ease the squeeze: “Allowing foreign carriers more freedom to operate on Russia’s domestic market would not be fair at this point,” he said.

“We won’t take that option, even though demand for domestic services and extra capacity is rising. On the other hand, we cannot and will not prevent operators from importing much-needed equipment.”

By 2015, Russia’s transport ministry expects the nation’s air traffic to increase to 65 million passengers, up from 45 million last year.

Over this period, Russian industry should produce 688 mainline aircraft of all types.

“This programme is based on confirmed orders received by United Aircraft Corporation,” says Levitin. “If manufacturers fail to meet production targets, our airlines will only continue acquiring foreign models.”

Source: Air Transport Intelligence news