As part of sanctions against Russia, the European Union has closed the airspace for the charter airline Southwind Airlines, registered in Turkey, associated with the tour operator Pegas. This was reported by the Association of Tour Operators of Russia (ATOR) and the Turkish tourism publication TurizmGuncel.
Because of this, on the evening of March 29, the departure of the Southwind plane from Egypt, from Sharm el-Sheikh, to Moscow was delayed for 11 hours. Formally, it was supposed to fly under the code SM903 of the Egyptian airline Air Cairo, with which Southwind entered into a cooperation agreement in November 2023.
On the afternoon of March 30, a plane carrying clients of tour operators Coral Travel and Pegas Touristik landed at Sheremetyevo Airport.
As ATOR notes, due to the sanctions, Southwind will cancel flights from Kaliningrad to Antalya, and Pegas will be offered tourists receive a refund or flight via Moscow and St. Petersburg.
According to the Southwind website, the airline appeared in April 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “to circumvent anti-Russian sanctions.” Then the EU completely closed the skies to Russian aircraft.
Southwind flew from Russia and neighboring countries to Turkey, to Antalya. Representatives of the carrier wrote that they cooperate with Russian tour operators — Pegas Touristik, ANEX Tour and Coral Travel. As the German tabloid Bild noted, Southwind received most of its fleet and personnel from the Russian Nordwind, a subsidiary of Pegas. The Izvestia newspaper, in its materials about Southwind, also called it affiliated with Pegas.
The United States in the summer of 2022 banned the transfer of American-made components to Nordwind, and subsequently to Pegas. The unnamed documents mentioned Pegas' Turkish airline partner, leaving Southwind temporarily unable to fly two of its Boeing aircraft to Russia and facing difficulties maintaining engines from Pratt & Whitney.