Newsday

By ANNA DOLGOV, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW (AP) -- The weary passengers sit in the airport hall surrounded by ratty suitcases and cardboard boxes. They don't even stir as a loudspeaker announces another flight delay.

Scenes such as these -- delayed or canceled domestic flights -- seem as commonplace as actual departures at Moscow's Sheremetyevo 1 and other Russian airports of late. The country's civil aviation industry is in a nosedive, another victim of Russia's protracted economic decline.

Overall air-passenger traffic shrunk from 135 million people a year in the 1980s -- the heyday of Soviet-era subsidized travel -- to 20.1 million in 1999, according to government figures. Airlines in the United States carried some 600 million people the same year.

International service is getting by thanks to a steady flow of Western business travelers and tourists. But in a country that once relied on internal air travel, domestic routes are being abandoned, airlines are folding and the nation's fleet of planes continues to shrink.

''What happened in the past 10 years, I would express in a very few words: The (civil) aviation market has disappeared,'' said Yevgeny Fedosov, head of Russia's State Research Institute for Aviation Systems.

For the world's largest country, stretching 6,015 miles from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific coast, air travel is vital. In Siberia, planes are often the only practical way to reach isolated cities because harsh winters make roads impassable for up to nine months each year.

But Russia has been closing airports. Of the 1,300 airports operating in 1992, the year after the Soviet collapse, just 533 are still open, according to the Federal Aviation Service.

Aeroflot, once the sole domestic air carrier, was split up into hundreds of smaller companies. many of which quickly collapsed. The airlines still in business often are too small to be effective and many have just one or two outdated Soviet-era airliners that should have been scrapped years ago, officials say.

Transaero, often cited as a model airline because of its high standards and Western jets, has eight planes in its fleet, but only four are flying. The company lost money for years, and only began posting modest profits recently after cutting flights and forging partnership deals, said company chairman Alexander Pleshakov.

Aeroflot, still the biggest Russian carrier, has fared somewhat better, earning $15 million in 1999, according to company deputy director Alexander Lopukhin.

The industry has a poor safety record by international standards, mainly because of its reliance on old planes that are poorly maintained.

Most Soviet-era planes are 20 years or older and will have to be scrapped in the next few years, experts say. New planes are vital, but the airlines cannot afford them.

The price of a long-range Ilyushin-96 plane can reach $75 million, and a medium-range Tupolev-204 goes for $30 million, Fedosov said. Comparable Western planes are more expensive.

And the Russian aircraft industry is in even worse shape than the airlines. Soviet factories churned out about 2,500 aircraft a year, Fedosov said. Russian plants produce just a few dozen, mostly helicopters or military jets for export.

''Aviation factories manufacture planes they expect somebody to buy, but there is no money to buy them,'' said Vladimir Shilov, a Federal Aviation Service official.

Western airplane manufacturers hoped for a major new market in Russia following the Soviet collapse. A few Russian airlines have leased Western airliners produced by Boeing and Airbus, but actual sales have been almost nonexistent.

Industry executives hope the government will find funds to keep civil aviation from crashing, but are not optimistic.

''Then we should say ... be prepared, people, to get on carts and wagons, on reindeer, and trail across our Siberia on nobody-knows-what,'' said Alexei Mayorov of Transaero.

AP-NY-04-24-00 1448EDT< 

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), April 24, 2000