Aeroflot Group

A white Airbus with a huge Russian flag on the tail in Antalya, a red-and-white Superjet on the apron in Saint Petersburg, a plain Boeing 737 of the budget subsidiary in Moscow: all three belong to the Aeroflot Group, Russia’s largest aviation group. For spotters in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the group has disappeared from everyday life since 2022. That makes it all the more important to tell the brands apart – when traveling, in archive photos and when looking at the flight tracker.

From Soviet monopoly to airline group

Aeroflot’s history goes back to 1923, when the company Dobrolet started civil air transport in the young Soviet Union. In 1932, the name Aeroflot was introduced for the country’s entire civil air fleet. For decades, Aeroflot was therefore not an airline in today’s sense but practically the whole of civil aviation: long-haul jets, regional aircraft, crop dusters and helicopters all ran under the same name. If you are interested in the types of that era, the article on Soviet airliners gives you a fitting overview.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the monopoly broke up into hundreds of regional companies. Today’s Aeroflot emerged from the international part and was converted into a joint-stock company. The state remains the majority owner to this day. Competition came in the 1990s and 2000s from private airlines such as Transaero, which collapsed in 2015.

The airline became a group when Aeroflot took control of several state-owned regional operations from 2011 – above all Rossiya from Saint Petersburg. In 2014, Pobeda added a low-cost brand of its own. Unlike at Air France-KLM or the Lufthansa Group, there is no pure holding company here: Aeroflot is the group parent and the largest airline at once.

According to the group, as reported by the trade press, it carried around 55.3 million passengers in 2025 – practically as many as the year before. Most of them are on domestic flights, because the huge country depends on air transport and many international destinations have been dropped since 2022.

The group’s airlines at a glance

The three brands have clearly distributed roles. The table shows codes, focus and typical fleet.

One peculiarity concerns Rossiya: the airline has its own codes but has also flown under the parent’s SU flight numbers since 2014. On the tracker, you then see an SU number, but the aircraft itself belongs to Rossiya. How flight number and callsign relate is explained in the article Callsign and flight number.

Aeroflot: flagship from Moscow

Aeroflot flies from Moscow-Sheremetyevo, the group’s most important hub. Other focus points are Saint Petersburg-Pulkovo, Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and Sochi on the Black Sea. According to publicly available fleet overviews (as of 2025), the main company operates around 170 aircraft, spread across five Western families.

On short- and medium-haul, the A320 and A321 as well as the Boeing 737-800 dominate. On long-haul, the A330-300, the 777-300ER and a small number of A350-900s fly. The A350s only joined the fleet shortly before the sanctions and are thus the airline’s youngest widebody jets.

For the future, Aeroflot is betting on Russian new-builds. The MC-21 from the United Aircraft Corporation is seen as the future medium-haul flagship. Certification of the version with Russian engines and systems has been delayed; according to the trade press, Aeroflot expects first deliveries from 2027. Other Russian types such as the Tu-214 are also on the order list.

Rossiya: Superjets and shuttle

Rossiya combines two lines: the aviation enterprise founded in 1934 at Pulkovo Airport in Saint Petersburg and the state-owned company Rossiya, which flew from 1992. In 2006 the two merged, and Saint Petersburg became the headquarters. In November 2011, Aeroflot took over about three quarters of the shares. In 2016, the regional airlines Donavia from Rostov-on-Don and Orenair from Orenburg were absorbed into Rossiya – since then it has been the group’s second major network brand.

Since the restart in 2016, Rossiya has carried an eye-catching design: red and white, with a pattern of small symbols reminiscent of turbine blades that grow denser toward the tail. Before that, the airline wore a different, plainer design – older photos show this variant.

The most interesting for spotters is the Superjet fleet. In summer 2022, Rossiya took over all of Aeroflot’s Superjet 100s and has since been considered the world’s largest operator of the type. Rossiya also flies the A319, the A320, the 737-800 and, on long-haul, the 777-300ER and the older 777-300. Add to that some 737-900ERs and a small number of Boeing 747-400s; how many of them fly regularly is hard to verify from the outside.

Rossiya now also serves the shuttle route between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, which Aeroflot flew before. That, too, shows that the lines between the two network brands are fluid – the markings on the aircraft are not.

Pobeda: the second low-cost attempt

Pobeda – “victory” in English – is already the group’s second attempt at a budget airline. The first subsidiary, Dobrolet, was founded in 2013, started flight operations in 2014, flew to Crimea after its annexation and therefore ended up on the EU sanctions list. In August 2014, it ceased operations. Only a few weeks later, Aeroflot founded a new company, which started flight operations from Moscow-Vnukovo on December 1, 2014.

The business model is classic: a single-type fleet and lean processes. Pobeda flies only the Boeing 737-800; fleet overviews listed around 42 aircraft in 2025. Besides Vnukovo, the airline also uses Sheremetyevo, and other important destinations are Saint Petersburg and Sochi.

After 2022, lessors also tried to get their aircraft back from Pobeda. As with its sisters, most aircraft were re-registered in Russia and keep flying – now with RA- registrations.

Sanctions: what has changed since 2022

No other aviation group has been shaped so strongly by political decisions in recent years. After Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the cuts came in rapid succession.

Airspace: At the end of February 2022, the EU closed its airspace to Russian airlines, and Switzerland and the United Kingdom followed. Since then, neither Aeroflot nor Rossiya or Pobeda lands in Frankfurt, Vienna or Zurich. Conversely, Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from these countries.

Alliance: At the end of April 2022, SkyTeam suspended Aeroflot’s membership. How the alliances work is explained in the article Star Alliance, Oneworld and SkyTeam.

Leasing and registrations: A large part of the Western fleet was leased and registered abroad, often in Bermuda. In March 2022, Bermuda’s aviation authority suspended the airworthiness certificates of the aircraft operated by Russian airlines. Russia responded with a change in the law that allowed re-registration on its own register. This is how VP-B and VQ-B registrations turned into RA- registrations en masse. Why so many aircraft are registered abroad in the first place is shown in the articles Offshore registrations and leasing and Aircraft leasing explained.

Maintenance: In 2022, the US government prohibited companies from servicing Aeroflot’s Boeing aircraft or supplying them with parts; similar restrictions hit Rossiya. Aeroflot switched to a Russian booking system and has since obtained spare parts through indirect routes. The airline later reached agreements with individual lessors: in September 2023, it bought 17 aircraft and five spare engines from the lessor AerCap.

Where you can still see the group today

For spotters from German-speaking countries, the Aeroflot Group now mostly means one thing: travel. The airlines continue to fly to countries that have not closed their airspace. These include above all Turkey, the Gulf states, parts of Asia and several of Russia’s neighbors.

In Turkey, the group is especially present. At Antalya, flights from Russia land regularly in the vacation season, and Istanbul Airport is also served. If you are traveling there, you will find practical tips in the guide to plane spotting in Istanbul. In the Gulf, Dubai is among the destinations; tips are in the article Plane spotting in Dubai.

Which routes are currently served changes with every schedule. The most reliable way to check is shortly before your trip in the flight tracker – search for the callsigns AFL, SDM and PBD. How to do that is shown in the guide Flight tracking with ADS-B.

How to identify the right operator

At the Aeroflot Group, the flight number easily leads you down the wrong path, because Rossiya partly flies under SU numbers. With these steps, you arrive at a reliable sighting.

A helpful companion for archive photos is the article Recognizing hybrid liveries – such hybrid forms keep turning up on aircraft that were returned or reflagged after 2022.

Liveries: how to recognize the brands

Aeroflot has changed its look several times. After the turn of the millennium, the jets flew with a silver fuselage, a blue underside and a stylized flag on the tail. In early 2020, the airline unveiled a revised version: the silver gave way to a white fuselage, the flag on a blue background has since covered almost the whole tail, and the winglets also carry the national colors. What remained is the winged hammer-and-sickle emblem – a legacy of the Soviet era that sits below the windows. For your archive, that is a handy dating feature: silver means the older livery, white the newer.

You recognize Rossiya from afar by its red and white with the symbol pattern. Pobeda goes for a plain look with its own titles.

The fleet between West and East

Aeroflot radically switched its fleet to Western jets in the 2000s. Types such as the Tu-154 and the Il-96, which shaped the picture for decades, gradually disappeared from the main company’s scheduled service. If you want to see these classics, you are more likely to find them in a museum today, for example at the Central Air Force Museum in Monino. The entry on Tupolev fits the history of the designers.

Since the sanctions, development has gone in the opposite direction. The Western jets from Airbus and Boeing remain the backbone, but no new ones are coming. In the long term, the group is therefore betting on the Superjet, MC-21 and Tu-214 from Russian production. How fast this conversion succeeds depends on the certification of the new-builds with Russian engines and systems – as of October 2026, the programs are behind the original plans.

Conclusion

The Aeroflot Group is a state-owned group with three clearly distinguishable brands: Aeroflot as the flagship from Moscow, Rossiya with Superjets and Saint Petersburg roots, Pobeda as a budget airline with 737-800s. Since 2022, all three have disappeared from European airspace, left SkyTeam and switched to Russian registrations. For spotters, that means sightings happen on trips to Turkey, the Gulf or Asia – and the archive from before gains in value.