Closed skies are eating russian aviation’s profits

On 23 October Aeroflot asked passengers on cancelled flights not to come to the airport at all: all four Moscow airports had shut completely for the second time in two days. Closures are no longer incidents. They are the normal state of russian civil aviation, and they have a price.

The mechanism is the “Kovyor” (“Carpet”) plan, a russian air-traffic procedure that clears the sky over an area and halts all take-offs and landings when drones are detected. Ukrainian long-range drone raids now trigger it every day, often at the busiest hubs.

Closures · all of 2025

1,923

5.3 a day · Osprey / The Insider

Summer 2026 alone

2,182

13.5% more than the whole of 2025, in three months

August 2026

993

32 a day · the worst month yet

Key figures

RUB 1.925trn

2025 revenue of all russian passenger airlines (≈ $24bn)

RUB 31bn

their combined operating profit: a margin of about 1.6%

−4.3%

passenger numbers, January–August 2026: 70.5m vs 73.7m a year earlier

7.6m

passengers in 2026 waited more than 3 hours to depart, 2.5 times as many as in 2025

The whole story sits in the ratio of two numbers. An industry that earns only RUB 31bn a year from flying is taking a hit that, even by the most cautious estimate (the government’s own), wipes out more than half of that profit, and by market estimates exceeds it several times over. Without a single aircraft being struck, every night of “Kovyor” works like a tax on russian aviation.

Resources: The Insider, Euronews, Kommersant, TASS / Rambler, The Moscow Times

From incidents to a regime

In 2025 russian airports halted operations 1,923 times, 5.3 times a day on average. By August 2026 the daily rate was 6.1 times higher. The number of drones in russian airspace grew alongside: Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation-risk firm, estimates 4,000–5,000 a month at the start of the year and about 16,000 in August.

For a European yardstick: Germany, rattled by drone sightings over its airports, recorded 116 drone-related closures in 2025, which the German Aerospace Center (DLR) estimates cost its aviation system about €160m. russia had 1,923.

Resources: The Insider (Osprey), UNITED24 Media, The Insider (DLR), Dialog.UA

The market under attack

russian airlines carried 108.9 million passengers in 2025 and earned RUB 1.925 trillion. The market is highly concentrated: the Aeroflot group (Aeroflot itself, Rossiya and the low-cost Pobeda) takes at least 55% of revenue, and analysts warn that any disruption at the largest carrier becomes the whole industry’s problem. That is exactly where the disruption lands: Aeroflot is based at Sheremetyevo, the most frequently closed of Moscow’s hubs.

russia’s Economy Ministry still forecast 108.5 million passengers for 2026 in September, just 0.3% down. To get there after −4.3% in eight months, the autumn would have to be markedly better than last year’s. An October in which all four Moscow airports shut completely twice in two days suggests the opposite.

Resources: Kommersant, Interfax, Vedomosti, MarketPower, InvestFuture, AeroTime

What a closed sky costs

The bill is made of small but daily items: grounded aircraft whose leases and crews still have to be paid, refunds, hotels and meals for stranded passengers, extra fuel and handling at diversion airports. Under russian law a cancellation caused by “Kovyor” does not release the airline from refunding and looking after passengers.

Resources: News.ru, 24 Kanal, Tourprom, Kommersant, Dialog.UA, pravo163

Who pays: the budget

Lower airline profits mean lower taxes. But an honest account of the budget hit has to start from the fact that russian aviation is already a net recipient: the state forgoes far more from it than it collects. So drones hit the budget in two ways: directly, through taxes and dividends, and indirectly, through growing demands for support.

Budget loses

RUB 10–20bn

a year: profit tax and VAT

Budget already gives

RUB 175bn

in VAT breaks in 2026 alone

Share of revenue

≈ 0.04%

of a ≈ RUB 40trn federal budget

Direct revenue losses

Resources: Interfax — VAT breaks, Interfax — extension to 2030, ConsultantPlus, Brobank — profit tax, InvestFuture — dividends, Finuslugi — Q1 loss, Kommersant — excise and loans, TASS — subsidies, Gaidar Institute — budget revenue

Who pays: airlines, foreign carriers, the regions

Airlines: the margin is gone, and the state won’t compensate

Aeroflot was already the only one of the top five carriers with an operating loss in 2025 (RUB 14.6bn) and closed Q1 2026 with an adjusted loss of RUB 7.9bn under russian accounting standards. The industry has negative cash flow and limited access to credit at high interest rates. With the Transport Ministry refusing to compensate “Kovyor” losses, the bill is passed on to passengers through fares.

Foreign carriers: the real tipping point

After Kyiv’s warning on 1 September that russian airspace was unsafe, foreign airlines began cutting flights: Pegasus, Turkish Airlines, flydubai, Kuwait Airways, Somon Air and others. According to 24 Kanal, Pegasus kept 2 of its 8 flights. None has left russia entirely, but insurers increasingly treat “Kovyor” delays as insured events. A foreign exit would hit the international segment, russia’s most profitable and currently its only growing one.

People and regions

For much of Siberia, the Arctic north and the Far East, flying is the only link to the centre, and rotation workers in the extractive industries fly through the Moscow hub. A Moscow shutdown ripples out as delays across the country. Rail can absorb only short routes such as Moscow–St Petersburg, while the Trans-Siberian and Baikal–Amur lines, according to 24 Kanal, are already saturated with freight to China.

Resources: Kommersant, Prospect, Kyiv Post, Türkiye Today, 24 Kanal

Who pays: passengers

We found no independent polling on how russians view the airport closures, so we judge by behaviour and by what passengers tell local media. The behaviour is eloquent: between Moscow and St Petersburg people are switching to trains en masse. Air traffic on that route fell 18% in the first half, to 1.6 million, and rail’s share of business trips rose from 61% to 70%.

×2.2

flights delayed more than 3 hours: 51,000 in January–September 2026

57% → 52%

share of departures no more than 15 minutes late

70%

of those surveyed by MTS Ads named delays as their main complaint about flying

+6–18%

rise in domestic fares in September 2026 year on year (ATOR)

Reports from Sheremetyevo on 17 and 23 October describe the same scenes: queues at information desks and for hotel rooms, people sleeping on the floor, sports teams unable to fly to matches. One passenger said they had been trying to get to Novosibirsk since Thursday; another described a scramble for food, water and new tickets.

Politically this matters for one reason: the urban middle class of Moscow and St Petersburg, which the war had barely touched, now meets it in person, in the departure queue. Whether irritation over delays is turning into irritation with the authorities, none of the sources available to us has measured.

Resources: The Moscow Times, Meduza, The Moscow Times (AlfaStrakhovanie), Gazeta (MTS Ads), AK&M (ATOR), MSK1, 17 Oct, MSK1, 23 Oct, Tolyatty.ru

What Moscow says

The official line is that there is no problem. Transport Minister Andrei Nikitin refused airlines compensation back in January and suggested treating airport closures as an “unpleasant routine”. Aeroflot admitted the “Kovyor” effect was “material” but not large enough to change its results fundamentally. After Zelensky warned that russian skies were unsafe, Rosaviatsia, the civil aviation authority, insisted that airports and foreign carriers were operating normally.

Aeroflot’s own figures tell a different story: the group’s domestic traffic fell 9.7% in September, and the company attributed the decline partly to temporary restrictions.

Resources: EAN, Kommersant, Kyiv Post, InvestFuture

Where the sources disagree

Conclusion

Closing airports will not ground russian aviation outright, but it is already making it loss-making at the operating level and shifting the bill onto passengers. An industry on a 1.6% margin has no cushion: every per cent of cost added by “Kovyor” is profit that no longer exists. The biggest unused lever is foreign carriers: if they leave, russia loses its only growing segment and the Moscow hub much of its transit traffic.

For the budget the direct hit is small for now, because the state already forgoes hundreds of billions from aviation in tax breaks. The real threat lies elsewhere: a loss-making industry that cannot be left without aircraft becomes one more line of spending in a war budget.

Analysis as of 25 October 2026. Our own estimates are marked separately.