Is Russian Aviation Becoming Dangerous?! One Year Later.

it's now been almost a year since Russia invaded its neighbor in the west Ukraine and we have to start asking ourselves what have the long-term effects been on the civil aviation industry and in Russia is flying in Russia even safe nowadays there's been a lot of new developments to cover since we last looked at this topic including some recent really worrying things so stay tuned [Music] we are very close to the one year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the human and material Devastation that followed obviously this war has far-reaching effects for the Ukrainian people but like I've mentioned before when I've talked about this topic I will concentrate on the effects of the invasion on the civil aviation industry both in Ukraine Russia and also in the rest of the world starting with Ukraine itself Antonov Airlines still continues to operate its Fleet of antarov 124. apart from two there are still in Ukraine but if you are trying to find the other five Jets using flight tracking websites you will have some serious problems doing so and this is most likely because the crews of those planes don't want to be tracked for obvious reasons as they fly crucial supplies to support their country's War efforts getting the other two Mantra one to fourth out of Ukraine will be very difficult even if any necessary repairs are completed and that's because of the country's airspace still being closed but aside from these Jets we also need to look at Ukrainian International Airlines Ukraine's flag carrier the company previously wet leased some aircraft to other European operators of the invasion but this was mostly during the very busy summer season right now all of the airlines aircraft are listed as inactive Ukraine International Airlines still has about 11 aircraft stock in Ukraine with four others being abroad but not surprisingly the airline has returned 10 other aircraft back to its lessers since the invasion begun so are all airliners that were inside of Ukraine when The Invasion started stuck there well it seems like at least one airliner was inside of Ukraine at the beginning of the war but has since mysteriously managed to get out of there and this is an Airbus A320 with registration Hotel alpha lima whiskey Sierra which was operated by wisser which is a European low-cost carrier in the morning of the invasion this Airbus was in Ukraine's libiv International Airport now if it was only 35 nautical miles or so from the Ukrainian Polish border and on the 13th of September at around 3 pm you deceive the aircraft casually crossed into Poland flying at 10 000 feet the crew flying the Airbus landed in katowicz airport about 40 minutes later and the aircraft then spent some time out of use likely undergoing checks after its unforced in action before returning to service about one month later wiser had three more a320s in Ukraine during The Invasion however all of them were in Kiev much further away from the border so they are still stuck there but looking further in previous videos I have also said that the global aviation industry which is usually the first to suffer from any Global financial crisis would likely not be that negatively affected by this conflict given the rest of the shocks that it had suffered during the previous years and it looks like this assumption seems to be holding up but the invasion and the sanction have had some effects on the industry including on the supply of aircraft engines Raytheon the parent company of engine making Pratt and Whitney said that transitioning out of Russia has been a limiting factor on its growth most likely referring to the need to Source key materials like titanium from alternate suppliers but important to look at this in the right context even though the war and other factors made 2022 a quite challenging year for Raytheon the company still grew with sales and backlogs substantially other engine makers like General Electric are reporting similar growth thanks to some really high demand Russia's invasion was a factory in production delays but the main issue was the timing of the invasion which happened just after the pandemic this meant that the industry as a whole went from very strong demand in 2019 to almost zero demand in 2020 with Russia's Invasion and sanctions coming right at the point when everybody suddenly needed to bounce back as quickly as they possibly could and that's likely a topic that may deserve its own video but the most interesting and probably the most disturbing developments around the airline industry from this war involved Russia's own Airlines and their future and I will tell you all about that after this short message from my sponsor who makes it possible for me to create these kind of videos if you want to truly understand challenging subjects like computer science and maths I highly recommend you to check out today's sponsor brilliant possibly the best Interactive Learning platform out there stem skills are really important for navigating the modern world whether you're trying to become a pilot or in just about any other Walk of Life brushing up my skills on brilliant has actually helped me with things like my personal finances career goals and also understanding world-changing Tech like AI or neural networks Brilliance Visual and interactive approach is really engaging and it makes stem Concepts actually stick in there so you can level up in just 15 minutes a day with bite-sized lessons right now I highly recommend their new course introduction to algebra which explore the twin pillars of the subject equations and graphs to get started for free visit brilliant.org Mentor now or click on the link here in the video description the first 200 of you who use this link will also get 20 off brilliant's annual premium subscription so check it out thank you brilliant now back to the video one of the really worrying trends that we saw when we previously looked at the effects of this war was that Russia's Airlines were grounding some of their aircraft to use them for spares basically to keep all of their other aircraft flying there are now reports that this is happening at an increasing rate and to allow this to happen Russia Russia's Aviation regulator is issuing approvals for this cannibalization of aircraft for an increasing variety of Parts the only condition russovitzia have put up according to Aviation week is that these parts must have already gotten approval from one or of several foreign Aviation authorities there are already two dozen different authorities in Russia's list including the FAA Europe's yasa and China's caac there are also suggestions that Russia's Airlines have already found alternative sources for aircraft Parts abroad which might be why they are now issuing approvals for as wider range of other authorities as possible basically to keep everyone guessing and that's because those who would Supply such parts to Russia are risking to become subject to sanctions themselves obviously now we'll get into those alternative sources and what they really mean in a minute but first we must answer a key question is there actually anything wrong with this process if a part that has been approved by the FAA or Aretha to be used in a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A330 for example why shouldn't they be able to be used there or would it matter if we cannibalize a non-active Airbus 330 for parts and use it as another Airbus 330. well the big issue here is that Russia's Aviation regulator is allowing the country's Airlines to make all of these swaps without getting approvals or even Consulting either those foreign authorities or the manufacturer of the aircraft and the parts and that's a really big deal because such a part swap might be fine Airlines around the world make such swaps in some circumstances almost all the time but without consulting the proper channels such a swap even with original parts can go terribly wrong and if you want an example of that you can look at the Air Trans Supply 236 which I made a video about over on the Metropolitan Channel you can check it out up here in that example the ground crew working on an engine's fuel system replaced a faulty part with a new one from the same manufacturer but this was a newer and slightly different version of the faulty port and to use it it would be necessary to change more part of the system to make it fit properly after the maintenance crew had finished their work everything looked just fine but in Flight the result was a catastrophic fuel leak that combined with some other factors led to the aircraft running out of fuel and its Pilots having to make the longest unpowered Glide ever over the Atlantic Ocean another similar example was to an interfly 1153 involving an ATR 72 turbo prop in this case a ground crew was replacing a fuel gauge and mistakenly fitted one intended for the ATR 42 instead of the atr-72 the ATR 42 is a shorter and smaller variant of the same aircraft with very different fuel tanks now the new instrument fit fine but it indicated that there was more fuel available than what was actually in there so you can guess what that led to these examples clearly show that using fact report from other aircraft without consulting the proper channels is not a safe practice and can lead to some devastating mistakes again these procedures are there for a reason and the same philosophy is true for spares from other sources even if the parts are genuine components from a reputable manufacturer but according to Aviation week Russia's Aviation Authority is now going even further than this russavitzia is reportedly allowing the country's Airlines to install non-original spares on aircraft that are made outside of the country which of course means the vast majority of all of the aircraft they have now I sincerely hope that the term non-original spare part is perhaps something that was Lost in Translation and not a direct reference to spurious parts of Unknown Origin but we do know that the Russian Aviation Authority has already allowed Airlines to change Parts and Equipment in the cabin Interiors like seats and possibly Galley equipment with others available locally and from other sources this started happening already last July of 2021 so the latest news could well be assigned that the Russian regulator is formalizing the process for using locally made Parts in Russia's Airline Fleet in a way that could eventually involve even more aircraft components it's worth noting here when we talk about cabin interiors and especially passenger seats that a lot of research and hard work has gone into these passenger seats and also the rest of the cabin equipment so replacing these parts with something that looks about the same but is far from a trivial matter and could have safety concerns and then we come back to those parts that the airlines have found from alternative sources that's quite worrying because historically sourcing aircraft spare part with a questionable history has been a sure way to get counterfeit and other dangerous Parts fitted onto aircraft to understand this we have to look at the different types of unapproved aircraft parts and how difficult they can be to recognize many people assume that the term unapproved part is the same as counterfeit part but outright fake parts are far from the only problem here a lot of parts in aircraft are life limited and have to be replaced after a given amount of Cycles or flight hours there have been some cases where people have retrieved such Parts either from service centers or from scrapped aircraft clean them up and then repackage them with fake paperwork to pass them off as if they were Factory original parts and that's not all sometimes genuine original equipment manufacturer or OEM Port might fail to meet the necessary specifications either when they're new at the factory or after an approved refurbishment process these parts should then be destroyed but there have been cases where they somehow made it out onto other aircraft like repackaged time expired parts and since they once were perfectly legitimate these time expired or out of spec part can be really hard to identified as unapproved aircraft components which is why Source Imports directly from approved vendors with full transparency is so critically important opinions vary on the number of incidents and accidents that have been indirectly or directly caused by counterfeit or other unapproved Parts but one notorious example of this was partner flight 394 back in 1989. that was involving a beautiful but old Converse cv580 the aircraft's vertical stabilizers separated in Flight causing the aircraft to crash with no survivors among the 55 people on board a key factor in this accident were the bolts that were used to attach the vertical stabilizer to the fuselage most of them turned out to be counterfeits with had been installed during maintenance sometime before the accident when the aircraft still belonged to a different Airline this strategy highlighted the dangers of using those kind of parts and it drove the FAA and other authorities to introduce safeguards that makes tracking Parts much more transparent so by choosing alternative suppliers and by not Consulting the manufacturers Russians Airlines might now start to lose out on these types of really important safeguards so are there any good news for the Russian Airlines done well it depends a little bit on how you see it the long-term goal of the Russian authorities is for Western aircraft designs to be replaced by Russian ones that don't depend on outside suppliers and as part of this last September aeroflot announced orders for 210 irikut mc21 aircraft plus 89 Sukhoi super jets and 42 level 214s Roger's goal which they announced last summer is that 80 of the airline Fleet should be Russian made by the year 2030. that's pretty ambitious as it would require the production of over 1 000 new aircraft big and small so how have they been doing for the last few months well other than announcing plans including this worrying news about sourcing spare parts we've heard very little from Russia about new aircraft production but one interesting detail involves the first four prototypes of the irkut ms-31 or the mc21 these aircraft were fitted with American-made pratham Whitney geared turbo fans which obviously are no longer an option for them so the manufacturer is now retrofitting these jets with Russian aviad vigatel pd-15 turbofans but the ms-21 has only been certified with a proton witness and a lot of other Western Equipment as well originally made just one ms-21 with Russian engines but the version of the aircraft with these engines isn't yet certified now retrofitting more jets with the same engines should speed up the flight test program but the problem for the Russians is that even the versions with the jet that has the Russian Indians on it still is going to need a lot of foreign Parts these includes avionics Hydraulics electrical systems it's fly by wire system and even its cabin interior and that's why a final fully russified version of the ms-21 isn't expected until late 2024 or even early 2025. I personally wouldn't be surprised if that deadline is pushed back even further than that though but there is at least one aircraft type in Russia's production plants that is already all Russian and in theory at least already in production and that's the Tuple of two one four an aircraft roughly the size of a 757-200 which up until now only had orders from Russia's government and Military with a lack of spare parts for Boeing and Airbus aircraft plus the need to re-engineer and replace the systems of existing Russian designs like this super jet and the ms-21 you would think that Russia would have produced a few typical of 2-14s for the country's airlines in the past year wouldn't you because officially at least this type was the interim solution to the country's need for a single aisle aircraft to replace Western Airbus A320 7737s Russians aviation industry has been quite vocal about their successes in the past few months but there has been no word about any new build to put a 214s until the invasion a year ago tupolev was producing just one or two of these guests per year and the Jet simply aren't efficient enough to compete with airbuses of Boeing which is why the demand simply wasn't there before the invasion Russia plans to invest 14.5 billion dollars in its aviation industry but in spite of this it seems that at least for the foreseeable future Russia's Airlines can only rely on whatever parts that they can find to try and Patch together their existing Jets finally of course we know that most of the western aircraft that remained in Russia after the invasion belonged to foreign lessers in total foreign lessers lost about 10 billion dollars worth of aircraft when Russia effectively stole them and kept them in Russia obviously this was a shock for the aircraft leasing industry which was already suffering the facts of the pandemic era downturn currently most of the lessers are locked in disputes with their insurance companies about compensations for these aircrafts but despite some early Grim predictions this did not bring a collapse in the aircraft leasing Market although we could potentially see some more consolidations and those more term at least had actually already begun back in 2020 before the war interestingly though despite the sanctions some lessers in Ireland were able to transfer ownership of a small number of aircraft over to airflop in January this year these planes were already in Russia and the details of these transactions are a bit unclear at the moment but one key factor here is that after all of the changes that Russia's Aviation regulator has made regarding spare parts and maintenance lessers simply don't want this Jets back anymore very few operators in other parts of the world would be interested in buying or leasing these Jets after everything that's happened but one consequence after losing so many aircraft and leasing Revenue in Russia is that less is everywhere have now said that they will be paying a lot more attention to geopolitics around the world before they agree to leasing contracts they are not in a rush to exit any other markets but they are definitely re-evaluating the risks of leasing aircraft in a variety of potential volatile markets and that's something that could potentially work against Airlines in poorer parts of the world where the politics are less stable I will of course keep monitoring this and inform you if there are any major developments but until then check out this video which I think you're going to find really interesting or this playlist if you want to support the work that we do here on the Channel please send a super thanks or join my patreon crew using the link in the description below or buy yourself some merch have an absolutely fantastic day and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Mentour Now!

Views: 484,251

Keywords: mentour now, russia, flying in russia, ukraine, war, antonov 124, moscow, UIA, airbus, wizz, wizzair, raytheon technologies, brilliant, trending, spare parts, engines, engine parts

Id: xs3nja2LKIs

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023