Vladivostok Avia, based at the city of the same name, serves Russia's Primorski region. It is the country's 22nd largest airline, having carried 238,000 passengers last year. It has a fleet of over 40 fixed and rotary wing aircraft including six Tu-154s which are mainly used on trunk routes in Russia, as well as some international charters.
The last time a Russian airline Tu-154 suffered a fatal accident was in 1996 when a chartered Vnukovo Airlines aircraft crashed on approach to a remote arctic airfield in a snowstorm. Since then there have been several fatal accidents involving Russian commercial aircraft, but most were regional turboprop operations on cargo flights. Last year a government-operated Ilyushin Il-18 crashed with the loss of 86 lives.
After the dissolution of the former USSR, safety oversight standards dropped - and safety with it. Both have begun to improve, but statistics indicate that they have not reached the standards of Western Europe or North America, nor even quite recovered their Soviet-era levels.
Source: Flight International
