Aeroflot Superjet 100 encounters another mid-air incident

Dmitry Zherdin

A little over a week after Aeroflot Superjet 100 caught fire in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, killing 41 person onboard, another Aeroflot SSJ 100 aircraft encounters mid-air incident, making successful emergency landing  in Moscow.

An Aeroflot Superjet 100-95 was en route from Moscow to Samara (Russia) when some 30 minutes into the flight it turned back and landed in Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO) on May 13, 2019.  The reason for the turnaround and subsequent emergency landing was the loss of cabin pressure, Aviation Herald reported, also noting that no one was injured during the incident.

The incident occurred at a time when Superjet 100s planes are already questioned for their safety. While there are currently no strong indication that Aeroflot Superjet 100 crash landing in Sheremetyevo on May 5 was due to aircraft failure, the reliability of Superjets is being questioned nevertheless.

On the one hand, there is the history of Superjets, ranging from unreliability reputation, problems like lack of spare parts, failure to entrench other than Russian markets, all the way to the deadly crash during a demonstration tour in 2012.

On another hand, reactions by airlines after May 5 accident also do not hint trust in the jet. A day after Aeroflot’s SSJ-100 crash-landed with flames in Sheremetyevo, Yamal Airlines announced cancelling its planned purchase of ten SSJ-100s.

Vasily Kryuk, the general director of the carrier, denied the decision was related to safety concerns, telling Russian news agency TASS that the underlying reason for cancellation was SSJ-100 maintenance costs that are too high. The airline currently has 16 Superjets, 13 of which are in service, based on planespotters.net data.

Meanwhile, Aeroflot has cancelled at least 50 SSJ 100 flights from May 5 to May 14, Kommersant calculated, also adding that these cancellations “cannot be called anything out of the ordinary,” according to their industry source.

Aeroflot is the be the biggest Superjet 100 operator in the world, as it has 49 aircraft of the type in its fleet, based on planespotters.net data. That is a little under half of all active Superjet 100-95s,currently standing at 123 aircraft globally.

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