AN AIR crash that killed most of a top Russian ice hockey team has left the Kremlin trying to repair the country’s transport infrastructure after years of decline.
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, on Thursday sought to deflect criticism for the crash by presenting a plan to overhaul the airline industry and push the market into the hands of the four biggest carriers, including the state-owned Aeroflot, which have better safety records.
Mr Medvedev said a large portion of old Soviet aircraft models would be grounded as soon as January, while small carriers with fewer than 20 aircraft would be closed over the next 15 months.
Russia has 130 national airlines, but just 10 carriers operate 85 per cent of the flights.
The president announced the state would encourage Russian carriers to buy aircraft abroad – a dramatic shift from previous years when the government imposed heavy customs duties on foreign aircraft in an effort to lift the domestic industry.
“The value of human life here should be greater than special conditions to support domestic producers,” he said. “I am giving the government an order. It should be a big programme [to buy foreign equipment] and will need a lot of money.” In 2010, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States region saw an average of 7.15 accidents for every million flights compared with an average of 1.76 in 2009, according to the Air Transport Association. The global average was 2.56 in 2010 and 2.54 in 2009.
Industry experts questioned whether the president’s plan would fix myriad problems in the industry, ranging from poor training to outdated equipment, corruption and bureaucracy.
“It’s nonsensical. It’s one of the most ill-conceived proposals in a safety sense that I’ve ever heard,” said one industry executive. He warned small carriers would simply add the cheapest aircraft possible to their fleet to keep their licence, and would economise on staff training at the same time.
According to Mikhail Ganelin, an analyst at Troika Dialog, Russia’s three largest airlines – Aeroflot, Transaero and S7 – already had 50 per cent of the market and were likely to increase their share to 75 per cent by the end of 2013 due to rapid expansion and the consolidation of smaller state airlines into Aeroflot.
Analysts said Mr Medvedev’s measures would not necessarily be enough to placate the Russian public, which has seen a series of transport-related incidents of late, including Wednesday’s air crash, in which 36 hockey stars and team officials died, and the drowning of dozens of children trapped in a cruise ship’s playroom in July.
“This is all more or less part of the same chain and this is not a coincidence,” said Lilit Gevorgyan, an analyst at IHS Global Insight. “All of Medvedev’s talk [about modernising Russia’s infrastructure] hasn’t really brought results. If anything, the situation has deteriorated due to spreading corruption and the increased inefficiency of state institutions.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)