Aeroflot in the 21st century: SkyTeam, Sheremetyevo and 2022

Published

2026-10-27

Updated

2026-10-27

Facts checked

2026-10-26

After the turn of the century Aeroflot rebuilt itself as a network airline. In April 2006 it became the tenth member of the SkyTeam alliance, and that year it was still a single airline of 7.29 million passengers, two thirds of them flying abroad. Then came a hub at Moscow's Sheremetyevo with new terminals, a fleet of Airbus, Boeing and Superjet aircraft in place of Soviet types, and a group of three airlines. By 2019 the Aeroflot group carried 60.7 million passengers. In 2022 the skies of the European Union, Canada and the United States closed to Russian airlines, and Aeroflot's SkyTeam membership was suspended. In 2024 the group carried 55.3 million people, most of them on domestic routes.

Tenth member of SkyTeam

On 14 April 2006, having met the conditions for entry and passed the alliance's commercial audit, Aeroflot became the tenth full member of SkyTeam (Aeroflot annual report 2006). Its partners were Aeromexico, Air France, Alitalia, Continental Airlines, CSA Czech Airlines, Delta Air Lines, KLM, Korean Air and Northwest Airlines. With Aeroflot on board, the alliance carried 373 million passengers a year and flew more than 15,000 flights a day to 728 destinations in 149 countries. Aeroflot signed bilateral agreements with all nine partners, and its Aeroflot Bonus members could now earn and spend miles on any of their flights.

The Aeroflot that joined was a modest airline by the alliance's standards. In 2006 it carried 7.29 million passengers. Most of them went abroad: 4,939,000 flew on international routes, up 6.2 per cent on 2005, and 2,351,000 on domestic routes, where growth was faster, at 16.6 per cent. Seat load factor across the network was 70.1 per cent.

More than half the fleet was still made up of Soviet types. On 31 December 2006 Aeroflot had 93 aircraft: 39 built abroad and 54 at home. The Soviet types were 25 Tu-154Ms, 13 Tu-134s, 9 Il-86s, 6 Il-96-300s and a single Il-62M; the Western ones were 11 Boeing 767s, 8 A319s, 10 A320s and 7 A321s, plus 3 DC-10-40F freighters. The airline had stopped flying the Il-86 on 15 November 2006. It planned to retire all its Tu-134s by 1 January 2008 and to replace the Tu-154 by 2010. Their successors had already been chosen: Superjet 100 regional jets, due to start arriving at the end of 2008, and the A320 family for medium-haul routes. On 16 May 2006 an extraordinary shareholders' meeting approved the purchase of 30 Sukhoi SuperJet 100s from Sukhoi Civil Aircraft.

A home at Sheremetyevo

Plans for a new terminal were taking shape at the same time. On 10 April 2006 Aeroflot's shareholders approved deals in the shares of OAO Terminal, the company building the Sheremetyevo-3 terminal complex. It opened three years later as Terminal D. Trial operations began on 2 April 2009. On 15 November 2009 the terminal entered pilot operation, and Aeroflot flew its first service from it, to Sochi (Aeroflot annual report 2009). By the end of the year all of Aeroflot's domestic flights had moved into the 172,000-square-metre building, and from 15 February 2010 its international flights followed in stages.

The year 2009 also brought a new chief executive: in April Vitaly Savelyev, elected by the board of directors, took up the post. Aeroflot carried 8.8 million passengers in 2009, and 11.1 million with its subsidiaries. From its base at Sheremetyevo it flew its own services on 111 routes to 46 countries, and through SkyTeam its passengers could reach 856 destinations in 169 countries.

The hub kept growing. In 2018 Aeroflot moved its domestic flights to the new Terminal B in the northern part of the airport; the move began in May and was complete in November (Aeroflot annual report 2018). The terminal was built for 20 million passengers a year. Passenger and baggage tunnels with driverless trains linked it with Terminals D, E and F on the southern side, a four-minute ride, and by the winter of 2018-2019 it handled around 400 domestic flights a day. In September 2019 Sheremetyevo opened a third runway, and Aeroflot's annual report describes it as the first airport in Russia with three runways. The new international Terminal C, built next to Terminal B and also designed for 20 million passengers a year, entered commercial service in January 2020.

What that meant in numbers is clear from 2024: 36.9 million of the group's passengers passed through Sheremetyevo, its main hub, against 7.3 million through its second hub, St Petersburg (Aeroflot annual report 2024).

A new fleet

The Soviet types left one after another. From 2009 the A320 family was the only medium-haul type in Aeroflot's fleet, and long-haul A330s were replacing the Boeing 767-300ER (Aeroflot annual report 2011). In 2011 Aeroflot took delivery of 16 new aircraft: eight A320s, four A330s and four Superjet 100s. The same year it wrote off two Il-86s and one Tu-154M, and by 31 December 2011 neither type was left in a fleet of 112 aircraft with an average age of 5.7 years. The company's own history page puts the end of the Tu-154M earlier, saying the type was fully withdrawn by 2010. Also in 2011 Aeroflot flew its first scheduled Superjet 100 service, from Moscow to St Petersburg.

The long-haul fleet changed next. In 2013 Aeroflot put four new Boeing 777-300ERs into service, while 22 aircraft of the A320 family and five Boeing 737s joined the group. In 2014 the Boeing 767-300ER and the Il-96 were fully withdrawn from service (Aeroflot annual report 2014). At the end of that year the airline had 155 aircraft: 16 Superjet 100s, 96 aircraft of the A320 family, 6 Boeing 737s, 22 A330s, 10 Boeing 777s and 5 Il-96s that no longer flew. Their average age was 4.1 years, against 7 years across the group's 261 aircraft, and the annual report calls Aeroflot's fleet the youngest in the world among major airlines.

Another long-haul type followed in 2020. The first Airbus A350 joined the fleet and was presented to the public in March (Aeroflot annual report 2020). Aeroflot became the first operator of the type in Russia, and with a contract for 22 A350s the company expected the type to become the backbone of its wide-body fleet.

Three airlines in one group

The group's low-cost airline was born twice. Dobrolet was registered in October 2013, received its air operator certificate from the Federal Air Transport Agency in May 2014 and in June began flying from Moscow to Simferopol, carrying 67,800 passengers in less than two months. According to Aeroflot's annual report, it stopped flying on 4 August 2014 because of European Union economic sanctions against the company.

The project restarted within four months under a new name. Pobeda was set up in September 2014 as a budget airline within the Aeroflot group, based at Moscow's Vnukovo airport (Aeroflot annual report 2014). It flew its first service, from Moscow to Volgograd, on 1 December 2014, and at the end of the year had eight new single-class Boeing 737-800s. Together with Dobrolet, the budget carrier flew 107,400 passengers in 2014.

The regional business was consolidated next. Under a decision taken at the end of 2015, the group merged its airlines Rossiya, Orenair and Donavia into a single regional carrier under the Rossiya brand, which began flying on 28 March 2016 (Aeroflot annual report 2016). Pobeda grew quickly: in 2016 it carried 4.3 million passengers, 38.7 per cent more than in 2015. In 2025 the three airlines divided the group's traffic like this: Aeroflot 29.5 million passengers, 53.4 per cent of the total; Pobeda 13.8 million, 24.9 per cent; Rossiya 12 million, 21.7 per cent (Aeroflot investor relations).

Growth to 60 million

In 2014 the Aeroflot group carried 34.7 million passengers, 10.7 per cent more than in 2013; 23.6 million of them flew with Aeroflot itself, and the group held 37.3 per cent of the Russian market. These are figures for the whole group, so they cannot be set directly against those of the single airline in 2006 and 2009.

Growth continued every year until the end of the decade: 39.4 million passengers in 2015, 43.4 million in 2016, 50.1 million in 2017, 55.7 million in 2018 and 60.7 million in 2019, an increase of 9 per cent on the year before (Aeroflot annual report 2019). In 2019 the group's seat load factor was 81.9 per cent.

Then the pandemic halved the business. In 2020 the group carried 30.2 million passengers, 50.3 per cent fewer than a year earlier, in what the annual report calls the most difficult of conditions.

2022: closed skies

The skies closed in the last days of February 2022. On 27 February Canada closed its airspace to all Russian aircraft operators, including the airspace above its territorial waters, effective immediately (Transport Canada). On 28 February the Council of the European Union adopted Regulation 2022/334, which banned any aircraft operated by Russian air carriers, any Russian-registered aircraft and any aircraft owned or controlled by Russian persons from landing in, taking off from or overflying the territory of the Union, with exceptions for emergencies and humanitarian flights (EU Regulation 2022/334). It took effect the day it was published. The regulation amends a set of "restrictive measures in view of Russia's actions destabilising the situation in Ukraine", as its title puts it. On 1 March the US Department of Transportation and the FAA announced orders closing American airspace to Russian aircraft and airlines, passenger and cargo, scheduled and charter, to be fully effective by the end of 2 March (FAA).

The leased fleet came under pressure at the same time. A Council regulation of 25 February banned the sale, supply, transfer and export to Russia of goods and technology for aviation and the space industry, as well as their insurance, repair and maintenance; contracts concluded before 26 February could still be carried out until 28 March 2022 (EU Regulation 2022/328). Aeroflot's annual report for 2022 describes the result: the restrictions covered, among other things, the supply and leasing of aircraft and parts, and some of the group's aircraft that were in maintenance or flying scheduled services abroad at the time were stuck outside Russia.

On 5 March 2022 Aeroflot announced that from 8 March it would suspend almost all its flights abroad, except those to Minsk, citing "additional circumstances preventing flights" (Interfax). The suspension also applied to the international flights of Rossiya and Aurora, while domestic flights continued. Federal Law 56-FZ of 14 March 2022 allowed the Russian government in 2022 to set special rules for leases of foreign aircraft and for registering civil aircraft in the Russian state register (Federal Law 56-FZ).

On 27 April 2022 SkyTeam and Aeroflot agreed to temporarily suspend the airline's membership of SkyTeam and SkyTeam Cargo, and all its current functions and applications were switched off (SkyTeam). Sixteen years after joining, Aeroflot's place in the alliance was put on hold.

The route map turned inward. By the annual report's account, the restrictions, including the closed airspace, brought flights to Europe and the Americas to a complete halt in the first quarter, and the group's number of flights fell by 11.9 per cent over the year (Aeroflot annual report 2022). Domestic frequencies rose instead: in the summer of 2022 Moscow - Sochi had 172 flights a week, against 109 in the summer of 2021 and 84 in the summer of 2019. The group carried 40.7 million passengers that year, 11.2 per cent fewer than in 2021, and international traffic fell from 8.5 million to 5.3 million.

The aircraft that stayed

The group spent the next two years settling accounts over its leased aircraft. In 2022 it began deregistering aircraft from the Bermuda register and buying them from some of the lessors. It bought eight Airbus A330-300s and arranged a sale and leaseback for ten Boeing 777-300ERs (Aeroflot annual report 2023). Its fleet ended 2022 at 346 aircraft: three new ones arrived, an A350 and two SSJ100s, and 13 left.

In 2023 it settled with foreign lessors over 76 aircraft and five engines through insurance mechanisms. The lessors dropped their claims under both the insurance policies and the leases, and the group's airlines kept flying the aircraft under finance leases with a Russian lessor, NLK-Finance. The annual report credits state support and funding for the whole industry. By the end of 2023, 185 foreign-built aircraft had been removed from the Bermuda register, the whole fleet of 349 aircraft was on the Russian state register, and 18 aircraft had been bought from foreign lessors. Early in 2024 the group settled over seven more aircraft with two groups of lessors, bringing the total for 2023 and 2024 to 83 aircraft and five engines (Aeroflot annual report 2024).

The group also turned to Russian aircraft. In September 2023, at the Eastern Economic Forum, it signed finance leases with the lessor Aviakapital-Servis for 18 MC-21-310s and 34 SJ-100s. These were contracts, not deliveries.

Traffic recovered on the domestic market. The group carried 47.3 million passengers in 2023 and 55.3 million in 2024; of the 2024 total, 42.6 million flew domestic routes and 12.7 million international ones, and the seat load factor reached 89.6 per cent. In 2024 the group flew 286 scheduled routes to 114 cities in Russia and abroad with 352 aircraft, 78 of them Russian-built. In 2025 it again carried 55.3 million passengers, 0.1 per cent more than a year earlier, held 41.7 per cent of the Russian market and flew to 19 countries. In 2006 two thirds of Aeroflot's passengers had flown abroad; in 2024, 77 per cent of the group's passengers flew within Russia.

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• Era: Low-Cost Era, 2005
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• In the catalog: Airbus A320-200, from 1988

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