I just came across this:

http://www.s7.ru/en/about_us/news/20..._Oneworld.html

S7 Airlines conducts negotiations with British Airways about joining the Oneworld alliance
At the present time the administration of S7 Group of Companies is conducting negotiations with its Interline partner British Airways about the possibility for S7 Airlines to join the world wide aviation alliance - Oneworld


S7 is the fomer Sibir Airlines, that formed out of the Novosibirsk division of Aeroflot. It's also had a few spectacular disasters recently, including the IKT incident from last year.

http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/a...Sibir+Airlines

Old news.

An interesting one for me as I've been talking to a potential client in Novosibirsk for the past 6 months about a project. I'll be an interesting one if it does.

I know quite a bit about S7 (from work) and if there is one airline I avoid flying in Russia it's them. YMMV.

Except to the few of us that aren't geeky enough to read the more obscure FT forums.

Pity S7 are so bad. They have a nice website, even if it looks the same as Benetton's.

...or maybe not, as the case could be

Geeky or otherwise, methinks that is where it belongs....

LMAO!

I noticed this on the "flying with us" section, couldnt find anything about what service you get though!

Article 3.19. Transportation of passengers travelling in extra comfort

3.19.1. To travel in extra comfort, a passenger may reserve the required number of seats. The extra seats are paid for at the normal economy class fare.

IIRC S7 was only to blame for the A310 crash; one of the Tu154's was shot out of the air by mistake by the Ukrainians during a military exercise and the other Tu154 was blown out of the sky by Chechen suicide bombers. In these last two cases S7 can hardly be blamed.

Could you elaborate please? The times I have flown S7/Sibir I was pleasantly surprised by their service (for Russian standards at least), but maybe I was just lucky and I should perhaps take more serious reasons into consideration to avoid flying them in the future...
Kras Air & Domodedovo AL (AiRUnion) e.g. on the other hand still offered old style Soviet service... So I was unpleasantly surprised when OS & LH signed a cooperation agreement with AiRUnion (and becoming a potential future *A member, God forbid...).

So should Oneworld consider themselves lucky/unlucky with S7 as a (potential) Oneworld member, and should *A as a consequence consider themselves unlucky/lucky if S7 will not join them?

If there is something wrong with S7 safety standards, why is it not on the EU blacklist? Shouldn't Rossiya and Aeroflot be on that list too as they all used to belong to the same Aeroflot group?

I could see BA, AY and maybe also MA working closely together with S7 to make integration possible and ensure standards.