Russia’s Utair passenger numbers increase 9,4% in nine months of 2023
A privately-owned airline’s traffic now stands at 84% of 2019 levels

Russia’s Utair Group saw passenger numbers rise to 5.1 million during the first nine months of 2023, when compared with the same period of last year.
Of the total traffic, 4.64 million passengers were transported by airplanes, while 476,600 travelled by helicopters. The Siberia-based privately-owned group remains one of the world’s largest rotorcraft operators.
For comparison, during first three quarters of the pre-crisis 2019, Utair served 6.1 million passengers.
Over nine months of 2023, passenger traffic generated by fixed-wing aircraft operations saw an increase of 9.4% year-on-year.
International traffic was up significantly, 33.8%, because of a low-base effect from last year, when extensive sanctions were first imposed against Russia, with all Russian aircraft banned from EU, UK and US airspace.
Predictably, domestic flying continued to improve at lesser rate and demonstrated 4.1% increase. During the period 10,300 tons of cargo were transported (+13.8%). Operating flight hours increased by 9.7% to 121,400 hours.
In September, the Group’s airplanes carried 544,400 passengers (+10.4%), while 63,900 passengers were transported by helicopters.
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