Brothers pilots

Russian aviation is sorely lacking pilots. Pilots from the CIS countries will soon be allowed to fly, but the crisis cannot be avoided

Yuri Boguslavsky, a pilot from Dnepropetrovsk, has received ten offers to work in Russia over the past six months. “They constantly call and bargain. Once they offered $8,000 a month in business aviation,” says the pilot. Now he earns almost three times less. But today only Russians and Belarusians can be in the cockpit of a Russian aircraft. “I don’t have Russian citizenship. It is difficult to get it, so for now I work in Ukraine,” Boguslavsky explains. And now he has a chance: the Ministry of Transport is considering the possibility of allowing pilots from the CIS countries to work in Russia.

There is no one to fly in Russia. Pilots fail due to age, but there is no change - in the 90s, interest in the profession fell sharply. According to Oleg Panteleev, the head of the research company AviaPort, civil aviation will need about 1,000 pilots in 2010, while schools will graduate ten times less. Yes, and those need to be retrained, because the Russian fleet is mainly updated due to the products of Boeing and Airbus. “We needed to hire ten pilots, but they simply do not exist on the labor market,” says Vitaly Tereshchenko, Executive Director of Sky Express. The crisis helped: the KD Avia company canceled the certificate, and Sky Express picked up the fired pilots. But Tereshchenko is still very worried: “What to do next year?” After all, as the economy recovers, so will air travel.

Aviation business managers have been asking the Ministry of Transport for a long time to allow them to hire foreigners. In October, Deputy Transport Minister Valery Okulov acknowledged that the requests would not go unanswered. According to Newsweek, so far only the possibility of opening the borders for pilots from the CIS is being considered. The Duma is already preparing amendments to the Air Code. “I really hope that by the summer of 2010 we will be able to open the borders at least for pilots from the CIS. Otherwise, we will cancel flights,” says Sergei Gavrilov, deputy chairman of the Duma Transport Committee.

So far, Russian pilots feel great. Before the crisis, their salaries grew and grew - airlines poached pilots from each other. “Now the crew commander receives up to 300,000 rubles instead of the previous 150,000. An instructor can earn 400,000 rubles. It's hard for airlines to pay that kind of money,” complains Tereshchenko. “I look at the payroll of my instructors - my heart bleeds. They make more money than me! But what to do, the pilot must be full and satisfied,” Denis Pavshinsky, CEO of Region-Avia, laughs.

But the main problem remains: the price of a pilot does not always correspond to its quality. “In Russia, you fly 500-1000 hours and you can retrain as a commander, earn the same money that a pilot earns abroad with 10,000 flight hours,” says Panteleev from AviaPort.

Lack of experience is already affecting safety. Suffice it to recall last year's plane crash in Perm, when the commander of the Boeing-737, Rodion Medvedev, was unable to manually land the plane in difficult conditions. After that, Rostransnadzor demanded to increase the flight hours required for the appointment of a crew commander - 1000 hours instead of 500. Medvedev had even less than 500 on the Boeing, besides, the examination found alcohol in his tissues.

At the same time, it is becoming more and more difficult for airlines to fight for discipline. “We had a case when we reprimanded a pilot for a gross violation. And the next day he comes with a statement - I'm leaving for another company, ”Tereshchenko throws up his hands. On condition of anonymity, the companies say that there was even an idea to make a black list of pilots, but due to a shortage of personnel, it was decided to abandon it.

Formally, there are people on the market. Since the middle of this year, airlines have laid off 550 pilots who worked on domestic ships. In such a situation, it is impossible to let foreigners in, Miroslav Boichuk, the head of the flight crew trade union, is sure: “We have enough people, they are ready to study.” “Those who wanted to have already retrained for foreign equipment and found work,” Tereshchenko retorts. The rest don't fit. “Many pilots from domestic aircraft come to us. But English is lame for some, ”says Anastasia Miroshnichenko, general director of the Aviapersonal company. Without a language, it makes no sense to send for retraining - the entire course is in English, technical documentation is not translated. Deputy Sergei Gavrilov says that many accidents occur due to poor knowledge of the language.

The second problem is age. According to the union, the average age of co-pilots is 40 and commanders 50. The cost of retraining is $20,000. “I don’t understand how you can invest $20,000 in a 50-year-old pilot. - Pavshinsky is categorical.

For Vasily Mukhin, this is almost a sentence, he is 51 years old. A Newsweek correspondent called him just as the pilot was leaving the bank. He was paying off a loan taken two years ago to retrain as a TU-134 commander. Recently it turned out that by 2010 these aircraft will be decommissioned in all airlines. Mukhin is ready to study further. “I passed the medical examination, I have excellent English, the total flight time is 9000 hours. I think that I can fly for another ten years, ”says Mukhin. But this does not convince airlines - everywhere they want pilots under 45 years old.

Young college graduates do not seem to have all these problems. But there are few of them, and the standard course of study, according to companies, is far from the needs of the market. “A student studies for four years, studies a lot of general education subjects and leaves with a flight time of 50 hours. That is, the airline must still retrain him at his own expense, ”says Pavshinsky. “We have already retrained everyone we could. Now we need to look abroad,” sums up the general director of Atlant-Soyuz Evgeny Bachurin.

But opening the borders to pilots from the CIS will not be enough. “There are almost no pilots who want to work in Russia,” says one of the pilots named Dmitry. - I judge by my Tashkent acquaintances: their salary is decent, life is arranged. Maybe adventurers will twitch, but there are few of them.” A similar situation, according to Dmitry, in Alma-Ata, Yerevan, Baku. Dmitry himself left Tashkent three years ago and works as a pilot in one of the Persian Gulf countries. “The quality of flight work in the CIS is even worse than in Russia. And experienced pilots will not run to us in a crowd, ”confirms Pavshinsky.

It would still be difficult for Russian companies to fight for pilots from Western countries - they are too expensive. It is possible to hire cheap pilots from developing countries, but experts warn that their level is low. And instead of bad English, there will be a problem of bad Russian. Aviators notice that even if now all restrictions are lifted to receive pilots, this will not solve the problem, but will only postpone the inevitable crisis for a year or two.

The opening of the borders should work as a temporary measure, Sergey Gavrilov believes, until the Russian pilots catch up. In three or four years, it is possible to organize the graduation of Russian specialists in flight schools, and then again prohibit hiring foreigners so as not to lose their flight school. But there is no one to teach either - there are few good instructor pilots left in Russia. Panteleev from AviaPort emphasizes that pilots from the CIS can become a temporary help, but first of all, instructors from Europe and the USA are needed to retrain the Russians. But it is not known when officials will mature to this step. They were persuaded to let pilots from the CIS into Russia for two years.