Russian airlines report combined traffic surge of almost 20%

The five largest carriers by traffic remain the same: Aeroflot, Rossiya Airlines, S7 Airlines, Ural Airlines, and UTair Aviation (Leonid Faerberg / transport-photo.com)

Russia’s air travel market continues to grow, as follows from the airlines’ statistics for October and for the first 10 months of 2017 revealed by the Federal Air Transport Agency.

Traffic volumes grew more than 15% year-on-year in October, reaching 8.8 million passengers and 21,917 million revenue passenger kilometers. In January-October, the growth amounted to 19.3% for passengers (reaching 89.9 million) and 21.1% for revenue passenger kilometers (221,048 million).

The growth in the volume of cargo transported (in revenue ton km) slowed in October to 12.8% year-on-year, compared to the year’s average of 20.4%.

The seat load factor grew by 2% in October to 82%, and by 1.9% over the first 10 months to 83.8%.

The Top 5 rating of Russian operators did not change, with – Aeroflot, Rossiya Airlines, S7 Airlines, Ural Airlines, and UTair Aviation retaining their positions.

Of these five, Rossiya (an Aeroflot Group company) demonstrates the highest growth rate, carrying 9.9 million passengers in the first 10 months or up 44.4% year-on-year.

Ural Airlines carried 6.9 million passengers, up 24%.

Aeroflot remains Russia’s largest carrier by traffic (27.7 million passengers), but its growth rate over the period amounted to just 13.9% year-on-year. UTair and S7 Airlines had their traffic grow by 9% (6.1 million passengers) and 2.6% (8.4 million), respectively.

Among the second-tier carriers, NordWind demonstrated record-beating growth of 92.3%, followed by Red Wings (up 65.7%, to 1.4 million passengers) and Azur Air (up 63%, to 3.2 million).