Coral Travel risks losing the Royal Flight airline

The air carrier that previously served the Coral Travel travel company may leave the market by autumn. Various sources that monitor the state of affairs in the industry tend to this conclusion. The company, which had 13 aircraft in its fleet until February 24, was able to keep only two Boeing 757 and Boeing 737 airliners in Russia.

Royal Flight stopped flying four months ago. It is planned that the company will not be able to carry out air services until September. At the beginning of autumn, the issue should be resolved with lessors who have not yet terminated contracts, but have announced their intention to do so by mail. 11 airliners were detained on their initiative in Egypt and Turkey during charter flights.

According to «Kommersant», the company's deposits have not been opened, that is, the contracts themselves continue to operate. Four lessors from Europe and the United States are afraid of secondary sanctions, despite the carrier's desire to acquire aircraft ownership.

If the company loses its main fleet, it will lose the operator's certificate and will be forced to leave the market.

Federal aviation regulations, approved by the order of the Ministry of Transport of Russia on January 12, 2022 and coming into force in early September 2022, require that the air carrier has at least three aircraft in the Russian registry or six in a foreign one. The company considers it irrational to conduct economic activity with only two sides.

It is known that representatives of the leasing company Ilyushin Finance Co (IFK), owned by Rostec, offered to "save" the company from liquidation. The company offered to buy Tu-214 airliners from her in disassembled form, but Royal Flight considered the cost of the aircraft excessively inflated.

It is known that last year was quite successful for the carrier. The company received about 200 million rubles of net profit by transporting 1.5 million passengers. Comparing the situation with the previous 2020 of the outbreak of the pandemic, which brought the company almost 400 million rubles in losses, the company hoped for an improvement in the situation in the coming 2022.

Now the company is thinking about how to save the remnants of the workforce and pay off contractors on time.

Representatives of the company assure that Royal Flight fulfills its obligations to airports in full. At the same time, about a third of employees were previously forced to leave the company. A significant part of the remaining employees are in a state of downtime.