A large Russian aviation group, which includes the main airline of the same name, outlined plans to bring in more than nine hundred flight attendants during the year 2023. This forecast emerged from official remarks cited by RIA Novosti, referring to the group’s own press service for validation. The stated plan forms part of a broader, group-wide effort to support growth in operations and to ensure that service levels keep pace with expanding activity in national and regional markets. The message underscores a proactive talent strategy aimed at sustaining high standards of safety, reliability, and passenger comfort as operations scale up across the network.
The group explained that 2023 would see intensified recruitment across its sister airlines, driven by a clear uptick in production activity and demand. Specifically, passenger traffic rose by about 23.5 percent, and the number of flights operated increased by roughly 11.9 percent. As a concrete illustration, Aeroflot alone has onboarded 452 flight attendants since the start of 2023, with more than 150 additional crew members currently undergoing training and expected to assume their duties by late September. Pobeda Airlines also projected hiring around three hundred flight attendants in 2023, reinforcing the scale of expansion across the group’s low-cost and mainstream brands and highlighting the interconnected nature of staffing strategy across the entire corporate family.
In a concise staffing summary, the Aeroflot group reported that its core flight attendant workforce across its network stood at about 8,827 people in 2022, down from roughly 9,404 in 2021. A representative cited natural attrition as the primary factor behind the 2022 decline, noting that departures did not reflect a reduction in headcount initiatives but rather transitions of crew members to other opportunities or roles within and beyond the group. This emphasizes that the company views attrition as a normal, manageable part of aviation careers rather than a signal of industry weakness.
The airline group further stated that 2022 did not reflect a deliberate cut in flight attendants by its subsidiaries. Instead, the company observed that the compensation offered to new recruits was already above the market average, yet the natural withdrawal of staff, particularly within Pobeda, continued. The explanation pointed to adjustments in fleet rollout plans for lower-cost aircraft rather than a wholesale pruning of front-line personnel, stressing a dynamic approach to aligning staffing with evolving fleet and route strategies. In practical terms, this means the organization prioritizes flexible staffing and onboarding pipelines that respond to changing aircraft types and deployment plans across the network.
During the same period, the company noted that attrition frequently came from voluntary decisions by employees. The organization highlighted this as a typical aspect of the aviation industry, where crew members explore better opportunities or new roles within the network, leading to periodic changes in staffing levels without triggering automatic hiring freezes or layoff programs. Such fluidity is framed as a sign of healthy mobility within the workforce, reinforcing the group’s commitment to keeping a robust pool of qualified attendants at all times to meet peak demand periods and seasonal surges without compromising service quality.
A separate thread in the company disclosures noted a shift toward gender diversification among pilots. The Aeroflot Group reported an increase in female pilots to 97 in 2022, continuing a trend outlined in prior disclosures that the group is actively pursuing more women to join its flight decks. This aligns with broader industry efforts to diversify pilot ranks and expand the talent pool across all aviation operations within the group. The 2021 annual figures showed 94 women working in flight departments across the group, with distributions across Aeroflot, Pobeda, and Rossiya, reflecting steady progress in workforce composition and a long-term commitment to inclusive leadership within the organization.
In the 2022 report, the company again highlighted the composition of its flight departments, noting that 97 women were employed in flight roles across the Aeroflot Group, distributed among Aeroflot itself, Pobeda, and Rossiya. The emphasis on female pilots underlines the group’s ongoing efforts to evolve its leadership and operational teams to reflect broader diversity goals while continuing to meet service and safety standards across all brands under the Aeroflot umbrella. Taken together, these statements illustrate a strategic, multi-brand approach to staffing that seeks to balance market-driven growth with a sustainable, diverse, and resilient workforce capable of delivering high-quality passenger experiences across Canada, the United States, and other markets where the group operates through its sister airlines.