Aeroflot to convert fleet to Boeing, Airbus jets

MOSCOW — Aeroflot's symbol is still the winged hammer and sickle, but otherwise, the former communist carrier has mostly shrugged off its Soviet past. The strongest evidence yet: By the end of the year, it will fly a fleet nearly entirely made in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Aeroflot is selling all of its Tupolev jets, the workhorse passenger aircraft of the former East Bloc. Once they are gone, only six of about 100 jets in Aeroflot's fleet will be Russian-made. And those planes, Il-96s, will fly within Russia and on select foreign flights, including the Moscow-Havana and Moscow-Hanoi routes.

That Aeroflot will fly almost exclusively Boeing and Airbus jets is a remarkable turn for a company that once owned virtually every civilian airplane in the Soviet Union. But the airline has tried to reinvent itself as a business carrier, and its passengers tend to prefer Western airplanes.

While experts say Russian airplanes are well-constructed, poor maintenance and repairs brought them a bad reputation for safety after the Soviet collapse. And as any passenger will tell you, they are also more noisy and cramped.

"I look at every bolt and every screw and wonder if any are loose, and I worry," Anastasia Tkachova, a student flying to London on Aeroflot, said while awaiting a flight at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow.

"It's more comfortable to fly an Airbus," another passenger, Mikhail Kotlyarov, said. But he was quick to add, with a touch of regret, "Russia will be left without its own airplanes."

Not exactly. In fact, despite Aeroflot's move, Russia's domestic jet industry actually appears to be making an improbable comeback.

It was the Russian-made planes' far greater fuel consumption that doomed them with Aeroflot, especially given the hard times in the industry worldwide.

Aeroflot's chief executive, Vitaly Savelyev, said the company was losing money on about 40 percent of its routes and that it would have to lay off about 6,000 workers in the coming two or three years, the Vedomosti business newspaper reported last week.

Over its history, of course, Aeroflot has had myriad problems. Horror stories abound, though statistically flying was as safe in Russia as in the West until a series of recent crashes involving both Western- and Russian-made jets, accidents blamed mostly on pilot error.

Tkachova recalled one white-knuckled take-off when flight attendants, posted in the aisles and looking out the windows, periodically called out updates to the cockpit about ice forming on the wings.

Irina Danenberg, Aeroflot's spokeswoman, said Aeroflot was selling its Tu-154 jets because they burned so much fuel compared with Western planes, not because of safety concerns.

The Soviet legacy is "completely irrelevant" today, Nikolai Kovarsky, a Moscow-based business consultant, said of Aeroflot. "They're extremely friendly, extremely professional. The service is impeccable. And they're Russian."

Aeroflot now operates 26 Tu-154 jets that it is taking out of service and selling, in the process laying off cabin crews to help shed employees. The reshaping of its fleet is seen as a victory for the company, which has struggled to shed its role as a source of subsidies for Russian airplane factories.

It is a trend in Russian aviation. For now, the Tu-154 and a smaller variant, the Tu-134, remain the most common passenger airplane in Russia, with about 600 in service. Russian airlines have placed orders for about 100 of the Tupolev factory's newer replacement, the Tu-204. But there are just as many Russian orders for Boeing and Airbus airplanes, according to Airclaims CIS, an aviation consultancy.

Russian aerospace is among the few competitive sectors of Russia's economy outside petroleum. The absence of modern planes now is not, in fact, a reflection of the current state of the industry but of the post-collapse crisis of the 1990s — the lead time is long on new plane designs. After a restructuring of aircraft manufacturers in 2005, a new crop of Russian planes is expected on the market through the next decade.

Aeroflot has placed orders for 30 new regional jets being built by Sukhoi in partnership with Boeing. And the Sukhoi superjet is also being marketed worldwide.

Meanwhile, the disappearance of the Tupolevs from Aeroflot's fleet should not be seen as a "blow to the image" of Russian plane makers, said Boris Bychkov, the general director of the Moscow office of Airclaims. "We still have excellent fighter jets."