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Recent aviation accidents have claimed the lives of the Iranian president and the vice president of Malawi.
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But Russia says Vladimir Putin is safe when traveling on their “highly reliable” domestic planes.
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According to JACDEC, Russian flight safety incidents have more than doubled in the past year.
A Russian official says the country’s leader Vladimir Putin will not be involved in a plane crash if he travels on domestic planes, state news agency TASS reported on Tuesday.
“The Russian president uses domestic aircraft. These are very reliable vehicles,” a Kremlin spokesman said Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
Peskov was speaking at a news conference when asked about the recent aviation accidents that killed the Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi and the Vice President of Malawi Saulos Chilima.
Raisi was flying over northwestern Iran when his helicopter crashed on May 19. Iran’s foreign minister, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province and other officials were also on board the helicopter. No one survived the deadly incident.
Chilima died in a plane crash on Tuesday along with nine other passengers. Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera said Chilima’s plane had been found.completely destroyed“Near a hill in northern Malawi.
However, Peskov said such incidents were unlikely to occur with Russian aircraft, given Russia’s strict safety standards.
“All machines in our country that transport civilians are also maintained at the correct level. There are very strict standards in this area, which are of course adhered to,” Peskov said.
“We have control agencies,” he continued. “The system works.”
To be fair, Russia doesn’t exactly have the best reputation when it comes to flight safety.
The Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center (JACDEC) announced this in February The number of Russian flight safety incidents has more than doubled in the past yeargoing from 37 cases in 2022 to 81 in 2023.
The Russian aviation industry’s flight safety problems are largely due to crippling economic sanctions imposed by the West after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Such restrictions have made it difficult for Russian airlines to maintain their planes because they cannot buy new planes or parts.
In fact, the number of flight safety incidents in Russia could be much higher, says JACDEC founder and CEO Jan-Arwed Richter.
“These figures only reflect cases that have become public. There is still a dark figure of unreported incidents,” Richter said. The Telegraph in February.
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