Aeroflot ordered its employees to less frequently fix malfunctions in the aircraft cabins due to a lack of parts. As a result, aircraft can fly with serious damage. The Project writes about this with reference to documents and sources in the company.
In March 2022, all senior flight attendants received a letter from the relevant department of Aeroflot. It contained an instruction: to enter data on technical failures and malfunctions of the cabin equipment in the flight log (Cabin Log Book, CLB) only after agreement with the aircraft commander.
The interlocutors of the publication note that before the start of the war and sanctions, senior flight attendants themselves wrote down all the defects in the CLB and put the ship's commander before the fact. “They wrote everything down, the chance to get a remark from sudden inspections was great,” one of them said.
“When problems with flights began and interruptions in the supply of spare parts, an unspoken decree came. It was a mass mailing to all senior flight attendants, which said that any breakdown that you encounter during the flight, you do not enter into the CLB, but verbally say what and where is wrong. Accordingly, if there are no spare parts and so as not to put the board on concrete, the plane could fly away with a malfunction, including a rather serious one, ”a senior flight attendant who has worked at Aeroflot for more than 10 years explained to the Project.
“Technicians don’t go into their pockets for words. I came to them and said: “Listen, well, this is broken, I didn’t write anything.” Often they answered: “Well, that’s right. All the same, this spare part is not there, ”said the flight attendant.
“The main goal of such an order is to prevent aircraft from remaining on the ground due to a malfunction, which, according to the documents, prohibits the vessel from flying until it is fixed,” a former employee of Aeroflot told the publication. “Earlier, before the war, this rule was strictly observed: they wrote every little thing and fixed it all right there.”
Cabin equipment, for example, includes oxygen cylinders used in case of depressurization or for emergency medical care on board. One of Aeroflot's flight attendants told the publication that in 2022, the airline's plane made a flight from the UAE to Moscow without a full set of oxygen cylinders on board. This was precisely due to the fact that the pilot-in-command had previously considered it inappropriate to make an entry in the CLB about the shortage of cylinders, followed by a delay in departure. The problem was indicated in the logbook when the plane had already arrived at Sheremetyevo. “Earlier, they were fired immediately for the lack of emergency equipment,” the source of the “Project” noted.
In toilets on board aircraft, a device called a “vacuum generator” is used for flushing, it is he who is responsible for the operation of the air “sewerage”. According to the manufacturer's rules, you can fly with a faulty generator for no more than 10 days. Nevertheless, the plane of the Russian airline flew with a non-working generator for about 6 months. Because of this, the toilets on board worked only when the flight altitude was over 5 km, below and on the ground the contents of the toilet simply remained unwashed. “Because of the sanctions, logistics could not deliver this unit earlier than six months later. And it turns out that the plane flew illegally out of order for about 5-6 months, ”said the source of the Project.
The publication notes that "at first glance, this problem may look like an annoying curiosity, but in such a strictly regulated industry as civil aviation, even minor flaws often lead to nightmarish consequences."