Ukraine's intelligence conducted a successful complex cyber operation and gained access to classified official documents of the Russian Ministry of Transport's structural unit Rosaviation, which is responsible for flight safety and records all emergencies involving Russian aviation.
The documents obtained as a result of the hacking are a list of daily reports for Russia for more than a year and a half. According to the data obtained, Russian civil aviation is on the verge of collapse, the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine reported.
In particular, in January 2023, 185 accidents were recorded in Russian civil aviation. About a third of them were classified as incidents of varying levels of danger. The leader here was the Russian short-haul "dry superjet" aircraft - 34 problematic cases.
In the first 9 months of 2023, 150 cases of aircraft malfunctions were documented in Russia. Over the same period in 2022, 50 such incidents were recorded. Thus, the risk of flying in Russia has tripled.
The most problematic areas of Russian aviation remain engines and landing gear, as well as other important elements such as hydraulic systems, flaps, and software.
The Russian Federation has serious difficulties in maintaining high-flying aircraft. Due to a lack of capacity and specialists, Moscow is trying to reorient aircraft maintenance to Iran, where the relevant work is carried out without appropriate certification.
As of March 2022, Russia had about 820 foreign-made civilian aircraft. And while at that time only up to 10% of them had undergone uncertified repairs using non-authentic spare parts, today almost 70% of the fleet has been put through such "service".
The acute shortage of spare parts has led to so-called aviation cannibalism, where some aircraft are dismantled to repair others. According to the available data, by mid-2023, the Russians had donated more than 35% of their aircraft.
Most Soviet An-2 aircraft are currently unable to get off the ground, as their engines were manufactured in Poland, but their supply has been halted due to sanctions.
In January 2023 alone, 19 different failures were recorded among the 220 Airbus aircraft in Russia. In particular, nine planes used by Aeroflot recorded 17 cases of smoke.
Of the 230 Boeing aircraft used in the Russian Federation, 33 technical failures of various aircraft systems were recorded.
Every seventh Brazilian Embraer failed to withstand the conditions of Russian operation, while Russia has 21 of them.
The DIU recalled that in September 2022, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) marked Russia red, along with Liberia and Bhutan, which indicates an extremely high risk to flight safety.
The military intelligence added that "an analysis of the nature of aviation incidents from the documents received indicates that a number of failures, especially those related to engines, landing gear and wing mechanics, are systemic. The trend indicates that the civil aviation sector in Russia is in a zone of serious turbulence with a high risk of a steep dive."
This is a direct consequence of the sanctions, the most painful of which were imposed on the aggressor state of Russia:
- a ban on the supply of aircraft and spare parts
- complete denial of maintenance and services
- refusal to update the software
- detention of Russian aircraft abroad
- restriction of access to meteorological information for air navigation.
Putting its population in mortal danger, the Russian Federation is trying by all means to hide the endless number of problems with civil aviation.