Rosaviatsiya: Russian airlines’ passenger traffic to decline in 2025

: Rosaviatsiya

Russia’s civil aviation authority Rosaviatsiya expects the country’s 2025 airline traffic to decline, its head Dmitry Yadrov recently admitted.

“For this year, Rosaviatsiya and the Ministry of transport set the benchmark at 109.7 million passengers”, he said at NAIS-2025 industry event earlier in February. The figure is 1.8 per cent below the last year’s result of 111.7 million passengers.

Rosaviatsiya traditionally tends to be on the cautious side in its forecasts. Last summer Yadrov predicted 2024 traffic to plunge to 98.1 million passengers – in line with the government’s roadmap for the Russian commercial aviation industry development until 2030.

According to that document’s baseline scenario, the volumes of passenger traffic this year should drop to 89.8 million passengers, mostly due to steep decline in domestic travel.

At the same event, Yadrov’s counterpart from the Russian transportation ministry Roman Starovoit however suggested, that there’s still potential for the traffic to grow.

To unravel this potential, maintaining the aircraft fleet in airworthy condition is not enough. He mentioned enhancing ground infrastructure and introducing new schemes, such as ACMI, among other means to support the industry’s progress.