S7 Airlines has frozen its project to build a factory for components in Sant Petersburg, according to Russian financial news outlet Vedomosti, which has spoken to sources familiar with the matter.
The Russian private carrier planned to invest close to 7.5 billion rubles ($83.3 million approximately) in this project, as part of the efforts to replace foreign made components and keep Russian-operated Western-made aircraft flying.
The Saint Petersburg plant was officially approved in February 2024 and was expected to be finished by 2027. It would employ around 300 workers producing blades for jet turbines, supplementing a similar facility managed by S7 Technics in Novosibirsk. In this Siberian plant, which entered service in October 2024, S7 repairs turbine blades for the engines of its Western-made jets.
It is not clear what the reasons are for this decision, whether it is due to technical or financial reasons, or to the expectation that the Trump administration will soon lift the sanctions that the US imposed on the Russian aviation industry after the invasion of Ukraine. The latter possibility has gained ground in early March, following Trumps’ change of policy with regards to Russia and requests by the Russian side to lift aviation-related sanctions.
The vast majority of aircraft operated by Russian airlines are still Boeing and Airbus models, since efforts to accelerate the production of Russian-made replacements, such as the new MC-21 airliner, have been hampered, precisely, by the lack of a readily available Russian-made engine, like the newly developed PD-14.
It is in this context that it has recently been reported that some Russian operators have resorted to to smuggling parts and components to keep their airliner fleets operative.
