Apparently, defects in Russian aircraft cabins are no longer automatically entered in a safety list. Maintenance intervals are likely to be increasingly extended.
At the Russian airline Aeroflot, the repairs are said to be less accurate. The Russian investigative website “Project”, citing recently published documents, writes that important information about deficiencies no longer has to be entered directly into a list as before. Flight attendants were instructed to enter “all comments about cabin equipment in the cabin log only in consultation with the aircraft commander”.
“Project” refers to an internal memo from the airline from March 2022. This innovation is said to have been introduced at other airlines as well. Aeroflot rejected the representation to the German TV broadcaster Ntv. “We believe this material is fake,” the company’s press office said. She accused the “Project” journalists of incompetence.
One of Aeroflot’s flight attendants told Projekt that in 2022, a flight from the United Arab Emirates to Moscow did not have a full set of oxygen cylinders on board. Although this was known beforehand, the pilot did not have it entered in the error list.
Aeroflot is already on the EU black list
However, the safety concerns are probably not entirely unfounded. After all, the EU put the airline on a blacklist as early as April 2022. It was not about sanctions because of the Ukraine war. The “EU Air Safety List” lists companies that are not allowed to operate in the EU because, among other things, they do not meet international safety standards.
Ultimately, however, EU sanctions also had an effect: Western manufacturers such as Airbus or Boeing could no longer import important spare parts to Russia. The only thing left for the airlines was: either remove them from machines that are not currently in use, try to get the parts in other countries – or relax the regulations.
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Engineer: Brake discs not repaired
An aeronautical engineer told “Project: brake problems after the sanctions were imposed. “First there were problems with the brake discs: you can fly the Airbus A320 with the brakes disabled, which was done on purpose,” the engineer told journalists therefore the period of time until the brake was repaired was significantly stretched.
The “Project” has another internal document from Aeroflot’s flight maintenance department. Daum is about the list of parts that do not need to be replaced immediately, even if there are problems. According to the document, this list is constantly being updated – and getting longer.
Maintenance intervals extended
The Russian charter airline Nordwind reports that kerosene has leaked from a plane. When an employee reported this, he is said to have found that there had been several incidents – but these were not recorded.
A report in the Russian daily newspaper “Isvestia” also shows how serious the situation is. She wrote last February about a request to extend maintenance intervals for Western-style aircraft. “The airlines have already sent proposals to the Federal Air Transport Agency and Rostransnadzor,” Marat Tereshchenko, adviser to Aeroflot’s technical director, told the newspaper.
In the meantime, however, even these measures no longer seem to be sufficient. The Reuters news agency reported that Russia has already had to send one of its Airbus planes to Iran for maintenance.
