Russian airlines’ traffic continues downward trend

Russian airlines carried less than 6 illion passengers in April (Photo by Leonid Faerberg / transport-photo.com)

Russian airlines’ cumulative traffic shrank 6.4% YOY in April, according to data published by the Federal Air Transport Agency (FATA). In March, the YOY comparison showed just a 2.7% decrease, so the rate of the slow-down compared to March has more than doubled.

In April, Russian airlines carried 5.96 million passengers, against 6.368 million for the same month last year. The international traffic continued its downward trend – down 24.2% from 8.713 million to 2.056 million passengers. Traffic between Russia and countries outside the CIS declined 25.2% (to 1.585 million passengers), while the traffic between Russia and destinations in the CIS decreased by 20.8% (to 470,500 passengers).

Domestic traffic, at the same time, continued to climb: 3.904 million passengers were carried on flights within Russia (up 6.8%), but the climb rate itself is slowing down. In March it reached 11%, and in February – 15.3%.

Load factor, by contrast, has shown improvement: from 75 to 78.2%.

Notably, for the first time in 2016 the cargo traffic decreased 13.6% to 79,200 tons.

Russia’s top four airlines – Aeroflot, S7 Airlines, UTair and Ural Airlines – managed to demonstrate traffic growth against the industry trend in the period from January to April 2016. The only exception among the largest carriers is Rossiya Airlines: its traffic decreased 6.6% YOY, which is still progress when compared to the 21.2% decline it experienced in March of this year. After merging with OrenAir and Donavia, Rossiya became Russia’s fifth largest carrier, having outperformed the previous number 5, Aeroflot’s low-cost subsidiary, Pobeda.

From January to April 2016, the cumulative traffic of Russian airlines decreased 3.8% to 22.486 million passengers. International traffic decreased 22.9%, domestic grew 10.9% to 14.673 million passengers. Cargo grew 3.5% to 332.1%.