Western Airlines Reduce Flights to China Due to Sanctions Against Russia

In 2022, RUSSIA banned Western airlines from flying through its territory, which led to an excessive increase in the cost of an already unpopular route. But Moscow also lost millions of dollars in Western royalties for flights

Western airlines are cutting back on flights to CHINA due to low demand and high costs of flying over Russian airspace, making it difficult for them to compete with Chinese companies that do not have such restrictions, the Financial Times reports.

British Virgin Atlantic cancelled flights to Shanghai a few weeks ago, British Airways announced it would suspend flights from London to Beijing from October, and Australia's Qantas, which did not need to fly via Russia, planned to remove the Sydney-Shanghai route from its schedule anyway due to low popularity.

Before the CORONAVIRUS pandemic, the Chinese air travel market was considered one of the most attractive due to the growing economy and the increase in the number of wealthy tourists, but the trend was disrupted by the covid restrictions. Then the Chinese air travel market became the anti-leader in terms of the speed of recovery, and demand on international routes is still significantly lower than in 2019.

Despite this, the closure of Russian airspace was the key factor in making the routes unprofitable, industry leaders told the FT. Overflying Russia increases operating costs by 25-30%. “If a Chinese carrier flies over Russia, they have an unfair advantage over us,” Air France-KLM chief Ben Smith said last year.

In February 2022, the European Union closed its airspace to Russian aircraft after Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine , and in response, Moscow banned airlines from 36 countries from using its airspace. According to the Russian Ministry of Transport, Western countries spent more than $37.5 million a week on overflights of Russia.

Foreign airlines flying between Europe and Asia use trans-Siberian routes over Russia. Since the 1970s, the Russian side has been charging a fee for this, the bulk of which goes to Aeroflot, and some money is also received by Rosaviatsia to support flight schools.

Before the covid-19 pandemic , Aeroflot's revenue from such flights reached, according to various estimates, $500-800 million annually, and in 2020, the air carrier lost about $250 million, Vedomosti wrote. "If one day we have the opportunity to see open Russian airspace, one thing should disappear: royalties for flying over Siberia," Henrik Hololei, HEAD of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Transport, said last year.

The number of international carrier flights from Europe and North America to China this summer has fallen by more than 60% from a record 13,000 in 2018, according to statistics from industry data aggregator OAG. At the same time, the decline in flights by Chinese airlines was only 30% compared with their peak in 2019. Chinese carriers now operate twice as many summer flights as their Western competitors.

Demand for direct flights between the US and China has fallen 76% this year compared to 2019 levels.

The head of a major Western aviation industry player told the FT, on condition of anonymity, that the decline in flights between China and Western countries reflects geopolitical tensions that have increased since 2019. “The nature of China’s
relationship with the Western world has changed,” he said.