Over the last 12 months, the price of airplane kerosene in Russia has shot up some 125 percent — driving up ticket prices, devouring airline profits and putting dozens of smaller airlines at risk of bankruptcy, The St. Petersburg Times reports.

In the last six months alone, 24 airlines around the world have gone bankrupt, according to the International Air Transport Association, or IATA.

The fear is that Russian carriers could be next, particularly as many of them rely wholly or in part on fuel-inefficient Soviet-era aircraft.

The average price of airplane kerosene is expected to rise to 37,000 rubles ($1,560) per ton in June, more than double the 16,250 rubles ($620) from a year ago, according to figures provided by Yevgeny Ostrovsky, CEO of Airport Fuel Supply Trading House, which supplies most of the airplane fuel for Moscow’s airports.
 
Some other airports around the country have already passed that figure, however, with kerosene at Yekaterinburg’s Koltsovo Airport costing 37,194 rubles per ton, including taxes and service costs.
 
Further price hikes could push airlines that use Soviet-era planes, which guzzle up to three times as much fuel as modern Boeing or Airbus planes, to the edge of bankruptcy, said Oleg Smirnov of AviaFond, an independent fund created to help prop up flagging airlines and develop aviation infrastructure.

“Bigger airlines are replenishing their fleet, replacing Tu-154s and Il-96s with Boeing-737s. This gives them fuel efficiency savings of up to 200 percent,” Smirnov said.

Increased competition on some of the country’s more popular routes is restricting ticket price hikes — for now.

“Prices only went up by about 10 percent for flights within Russia,” said Yelena Semiletova of Aeroclub, a booking firm that works with large corporate clients.

Business routes and popular destinations do not appear to be affected to the same extent as quieter routes where fewer airlines compete for passengers, travel agencies and analysts said.

Pavel Strokov, marketing director at Kortes Information Center, which monitors aviation, said many smaller airlines are currently in a critical state because the fuel price hikes came after they had sold most of their peak-season tickets.