Mexican air carrier Interjet plans to sell its existing Russian Sukhoi SuperJet 100 (SSJ 100) aircraft. Interjet is the only foreign operator of the SSJ 100 in the airline's fleet — 22 liners. Interjet decided to sell them due to its difficult financial situation, the newspaper reports."Vedomosti"according to his Russian sources.
The publication's sources disagree on how many aircraft the company wants to sell. Two sources claim that Interjet will put all of its SSJ 100s up for sale. Another source says that one aircraft was damaged and used for spare parts, in connection with which 21 aircraft are allowed to be sold. Another source said Interjet wants to sell 14 aircraft and keep 7.
As follows from data from the Flightradar24 service, only 6 Interjet SSJ 100 aircraft continue to fly. 16 aircraft are not currently in service.
The reason for the decision to sell is Interjet’s difficult financial condition, the publication’s Russian interlocutors explain. In 2016–2017 the Mexican peso collapsed, kerosene became more expensive, Interjet began to lose competition to other carriers. In 2016–2017 Interjet gradually stopped paying for spare parts to both Sukhoi Civil Aircraft and the engine manufacturer for these aircraft, Powerjet, and they stopped supplying components. The airliners began to fly worse and worse. Interjet was laying up some aircraft and removing spare parts from them to maintain the airworthiness of another part of the fleet.
The planes were delivered new to Mexico and are now 4–6 years old. Interjet actually bought the planes, rather than leasing them, and received a discount - the superjets went to it for $23.5 million each, with the market price then being about $29 million. Now Interjet would like to get $16–17 million for the airliners. Theoretically, this is a low price. But the technical condition of idle ships can be so bad that several million dollars will have to be spent on each aircraft to restore airworthiness.
Interjet, with a fleet of 22 SSJ100s, is believed to be the last foreign airline to operate this type of aircraft. Interjet is the second largest SSJ operator after Russia's Aeroflot, which has 49 such aircraft.