The document has been drafted by the Ministry of Transport in accordance with Item 3 of Record No. DM-P9-15pr of a meeting held by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on March 13, 2013.
The existing programmes of state support for air carriage (Government Resolution No. 1095 of December 29, 2009, Government Resolution No. 1321 of December 17, 2012, Government Resolution No. 1 of January 16, 2013, and Government Resolution No. 265 of March 27, 2013) are based on subsidising part of the fare for a single passenger.
The proposed subsidy applies to hub and regional airports where the distance of the great-circle route between them does not exceed 1,800 kilometres if the hub airport is located in the Far Eastern Federal District and 1,200 kilometres if the hub airport is located in other federal districts.
The scheme will ensure that Russia is fully covered by an air route network traffic with the minimum of budget allocations for subsidising this segment of air travel.
The 2013 federal budget has provided 1.35 billion roubles for these purposes.
The annual passenger flow on a subsidised route must not exceed 8,000 passengers. This is necessitated by the need to support only routes whose passenger flows do not guarantee a 70% to 80% commercial load for aircraft seating up to 30 passengers, something which makes carriage unprofitable and forces the closure of the route.
Considering that one of the basic aims of the programme is to extend the available routes and create new ones, it is necessary to increase the frequency of flights on them as much as possible, offering air travellers a better schedule and keener competition with rival forms of transport. To these ends the resolution recommends having no fewer than three flights a week on new routes; historical routes should put on at least one additional flight a week compared with the number of flights performed in the previous equivalent period, and have at least four flights per week.
Eight airports have been designated as hub airports: St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Rostov-on-Don, and Mineralnye Vody, with an annual number of passengers served of no less than 1.3 million and a percentage of transfer passengers catered for of at least 5% of total passenger numbers, which, as international practice suggests, is one of the basic characteristics of a hub airport.
A feature of the programme, unlike those currently in operation, is that subsidies are granted to one carrier for one subsidised route only.
The efficiency of subsidising an air carrier is determined in the following way:
-No subsidy is to be granted to historical routes if during the previous three months, including the one under review, the integrated subsidy efficiency indicator of actual passenger turnover (passenger carriage) exceeded the limits established by Supplement No. 3 to the Rules;
-No subsidy is to be granted to new routes if during the previous four months, including the one under review, the integrated subsidy efficiency indicator of actual passenger turnover (passenger carriage) exceeded the limits established by Supplement No. 3 to the Rules.
The integrated subsidy efficiency indicator of actual passenger turnover is determined as the quotient obtained when the sum of the subsidies granted is divided by the actual passenger turnover.