Expert on causes of global aviation crisis

With the onset of the holiday season, air traffic around the world has intensified dramatically. However, passengers in a number of countries are increasingly faced with the difficulties of buying air tickets, waiting for hours for a delayed flight, and being unable to find options with direct flights in airlines and aggregators.

Roman Gusarov, Editor-in-Chief of Avia.ru, told the Russian Bureau of Report about the causes of the air crisis.

"When the pandemic started in 2020, the borders were closed, sending everyone into quarantine, and the passenger traffic vanished. The pandemic lasted long enough, and the waves of coronavirus were repeated. During the period of no passenger traffic, airlines tried to minimize their costs because there was no revenue; that is, there was no money to pay salaries to the employees," Gusarov notes.

According to the expert, this is why airlines fired thousands of people, thereby reducing their costs and expenses and bringing their capacities to the volumes that were in demand at that time: "Now after the pandemic is over, everyone wants to travel again, and airlines have no staff, which takes time to fill in. When the demand for air travel boomed, airlines worldwide began to say that they could not handle the entire volume, as they were short of staff."

Gusarov notes that the lack of personnel is the main reason for the aviation crisis: "If you look at companies that announce that they cannot fulfill the entire flight program, they note that the reason for this is the lack of personnel, and in particular pilots."

Gusarov stressed that it would take more time to bring the volume of traffic to the demanded level. At the same time, according to him, the situation could become even more complicated after the introduction of anti-Russian sanctions: "The sanctions imposed on Russia may also partially affect the air crisis. Russians fly to Europe in transit, respectively, prices increased first of all. At the same time, it is impossible to increase the number of flights due to the sanctions on Russian air companies and airplanes. The Russian side cannot use most of the air fleet for flights to these destinations."

The expert noted that due to retaliatory sanctions, European airlines could not fly through Russia in transit to Asia. In this regard, they need to bypass Russia, which lengthens the route and significantly affects prices.