A Kremlin vow to ground Soviet-era jets after a spate of air disasters has raised fears that the remotest parts of Russia could be left cut off with no means of access by plane.
Creaking aircraft like the Tupolev Tu-134 and the turboprop Antonov An-24 are often the only planes light enough to land on the short gravel strips of Russia's permafrost-covered Arctic regions and the wind-swept tundra belt.
Many of those towns -- developed in Stalin's times to mine for minerals and drill for oil -- are built thousands of miles away from large cities and often not linked to other parts of Russia by either road or rail.
But the once-proud workhorses now fly with outdated and increasingly unresponsive equipment that pilots say often leaves them reliant on little more than intuition to land.
Two accidents involving the Tu-134 and An-24 this summer that killed a total 54 people prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to call for most of the aircraft to be retired by January 1 and the rest taken out in subsequent months.
But even the most senior officials were quick to admit that implementing the ban would not be that simple.
"Of course we could simply ban the flights. That would be the simplest solution. But then what would we fly?" Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov asked shortly after Medvedev's announcement.
One analyst said the ban could interrupt travel to at least 50 of the 300-plus airfields currently operated across the vast country. Transport officials said Russia's fleet of 90 Tu-134 jets could slip to 15 by next year.
"How are we going to reach the many northwestern and Siberia airports whose runways cannot accommodate modern Russian and foreign jets?" the UTair carrier that has the largest fleet of such planes asked in a statement released to AFP.
The problem is that Russia has no medium-haul equivalent ready to replace the two Soviet-era aircraft -- the last Tu-134 was built in 1984 and the An-24 has not been produced since 1979 -- while their foreign counterparts are too big.
This could be solved simply by paving some of the smaller Siberian runways -- a process that would take less than a year to complete.
Yet analysts said the costs involved would be prohibitive for most remote regions that still rely on Moscow for help.
Both UTair and transport officials insist that both aircraft facing retirement were initially built for war conditions and are sturdy enough to last for many years to come.
"I do not see any production defects with our planes. I think that the 'old fleet' complaint is a fiction," said Aviaport.ru aviation magazine editor Oleg Panteleyev.
Russia now plans to discontinue regular flights of the old aircraft and allow charters to fly for an unspecified time as long as the planes are equipped with new air collision avoidance systems costing about $200,000 each.
That figure roughly matches the current resale value of a Tu-134 and UTAir -- which has 28 Tu-134 and 25 An-24 -- said it was currently looking at Western suppliers such as the French-Italian ATR to replenish its fleet.
The only Russian plane that could conceivably could come to the rescue is the Sukhoi Superjet 100 (SSJ-100) -- a long-delayed Tu-134 equivalent that despite its name can carry no more than 100 passengers on mid-range flights.
The lack of post-Soviet aviation development has also left the Aeroflot national flag carrier with just six Russian-made planes -- each one made before 1997 -- in its 107-strong fleet.
Aeroflot chief executive Vitaly Savelyev promised Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last month that "at least 40 percent of the fleet will be locally-made by 2020."
But one newspaper report said that Aeroflot's first Superjet spent more than half of its first month in service grounded after developing a problem with its air conditioning system and was already losing the company money.
The analyst Panteleyev said that a horrific recent plane production track record and sheer necessity may force Russia to extend the service of its sold Soviet models whether Medvedev wants it or not.
"Russia in theory has the capability to launch the serial production of jets that can replace both the Antonov and the Tupolev on regular flights," he said.
"Our problem is that the rates at which these planes are produced is extremely low and is measured in the single digits."
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