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The blows are coming down hard on SAS, whose stock has halved in a month. Now the struggling airline is being forced to cancel several flights after Russia closed its airspace.

At the same time, SAS remains open for summer bookings to St. Petersburg.

On Monday, Russia closed its airspace to 36 countries, including Sweden, in response to the EU taking similar action against Russian flights after the invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian decision has consequences for the already hard-pressed airline SAS, where the Swedish and Danish states are the largest owners. 

”"We have two routes that fly over Russia: Tokyo and Shanghai. We plan to continue flying to Shanghai but we will cancel the Tokyo flights until May 1st. It will be too long a detour," says John Eckhoff, press manager at SAS.

The route to Shanghai will take the route south of Russia, which according to John Eckhoff will mean "a couple of hours" of extra travel time.   

What does this mean in terms of increased fuel costs?
”I don't know what it costs specifically. But it's clear that both time and fuel consumption increase,” says John Eckhoff.

In addition to the two routes that fly over Russian airspace, SAS also has St. Petersburg among its destinations. On Monday, the airline made the decision to cancel two scheduled departures to the Russian city.

”We have cancelled two round-trip departures from Arlanda that we had planned for Easter,” says John Eckhoff.

SAS mainly flies to St. Petersburg during the summer – and it is still possible to book tickets to the Russian city on the airline's website from the beginning of June. 

”"We intend to fly the summer program as planned. But we are waiting to see the situation," says John Eckhoff.

The Russian flight suspension is one in a series of bad news for SAS. On Tuesday, two more blows came when the credit rating agency Moody's downgrades airline's credit rating while Sparebank 1 lowered its recommendation for SAS shares to sell from neutral. 

In connection with the sell advice, the Norwegian bank cut SAS's target price to 0.1 kronor from the previous 1.90 kronor - a reduction of 95 percent. 

On Tuesday afternoon, SAS fell 15 percent, the most of all large-cap companies on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The share is listed at SEK 0.81, which means that the price has more than halved since the beginning of February.

SAS has almost 133,000 shareholders, according to Holdings. 

Source: DI.SE