Passenger traffic drops in Russia after terrorist attacks

A certain reduction was registered on domestic flights, although nothing changed on international flights

The volume of passenger transportation in the Russian aviation industry dropped after Tu-154 and Tu-134 airliners crashed in Russia on August 24th. According to various estimates, the reduction made up from 5-7% to 15-20% in comparison with the same period of the past year.

Yevgeny Bachurin, the commercial director of Aeroflot-Russian Airlines, told RIA Novosti on Friday that the passenger traffic dropped by 15-20 percent in Russia on the whole. A spokesperson for the Russian aviation authorities said, however, that the domestic airlines lost up to seven percent of passengers after the terrorist acts on board the two jetliners.

A similar situation has not been registered on international flights yet, which can be explained with a “deeper structure of the international passenger transportation and its sales,” the source told Interfax. “As a rule, people buy tickets for international flights long before the actual departure,” the spokesman said. The official, however, found it difficult to forecast a further change of the passenger traffic in the aviation industry until the end of the year.

”We are not a standard country. The passenger traffic dropped globally after the tragic events of September 11th, but we registered a rise. The whole world doesn't know, what to do with planes, but we don't know, how to get more of them,” said he.

It was reported before that Russian airlines had increased the passenger traffic by 19.6 percent in the first half of 2004, as opposed to the first six months of 2003 – to 14 million 474.1 thousand people.