Plan To Fly Crashed Plane From Siberian Field Scrapped By Airline

Photo: Vladimir Nikolayev / AFP (Getty Images)

Ural Airlines has abandoned its plans to fly a crashed Airbus A320 from the site of its emergency landing last September. The Russian carrier’s airliner had crash-landed in a Siberian wheat field. While everyone onboard evacuated the plane without serious injury, the plane was left stranded in the field. The aircraft is now set to be cannibalized for parts, a highly valued commodity given the sanctions impacting Russian aviation.

The Ural Airlines Airbus A320 was forced to make the emergency landing after suffering a hydraulic system failure. The initial recovery plan was to simply make the necessary repairs on-site, wait for the ground to freeze over in the winter and attempt a take-off from the field. Ural Airlines even declared the aircraft’s engines fully operational, according to Simple Flying. The ambitious plan required the airline to lease the field the Airbus was sitting on and arrange a round-the-clock security detail in preparation for the eventual flight.

The desperate attempt to save the Airbus A320 was called off last week. The scrapping process is expected to begin during the summer when weather conditions are better for people to be working outdoors in Siberia. The plane’s value in pieces greatly outweighed the risks of flying a plane that spent months exposed to the elements after a crash.

Russian airlines have struggled to maintain their Western-made Airbus and Boeing aircraft since the country’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The sanctions imposed on Russia was supposed to make procuring parts impossible. Reuters reports that $1.2 billion in components circumvented sanctions and made its way into Russia between May 2022 and August 2023. However, it’s still not enough to keep the country’s carriers operating as usual and cannibalizing aircraft for spare parts has become commonplace.