Air Tanzania Cancelled Its Moscow Flights, Then Uncancelled Them

Air Tanzania issued a public notice on 3 September suspending flights TC422 and TC423 between Dar es Salaam and Moscow with effect from 4 September, citing the outcome of a routine risk assessment of the operating environment along the route. Passengers holding tickets were offered a full refund or free rebooking. Within hours the national carrier reversed itself, confirming that services would resume on 7 September. It has not explained what changed between the two announcements, which is the part of the sequence that has drawn the most attention.

The airline did not name a specific hazard, but the timing points in one direction. The suspension followed a warning from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that intensifying drone activity was making Russian airspace unsafe for civil aviation. Russian airports have repeatedly closed at short notice this year during drone alerts, with flights held on the ground or diverted, and insurers have been reassessing exposure on routes terminating in Moscow. A risk assessment producing a suspension in that environment is entirely explicable. A risk assessment producing a suspension and then a resumption 72 hours later is harder to read.

The Dar es Salaam-Moscow route is unusual in itself. Air Tanzania launched it as part of a network expansion aimed at connecting East Africa to markets that larger carriers have withdrawn from, and Russian leisure demand for Zanzibar has been one of the few reliably growing long-haul flows into Tanzania since 2022. Few airlines outside Russia and the Gulf still fly there, which makes the route commercially valuable to Air Tanzania and politically visible to everyone else. Suspending it, even briefly, is a decision with more than operational weight behind it.

For travellers the takeaway is narrow but worth holding onto: routes into Russian airspace remain exposed to abrupt, short-notice changes that have nothing to do with weather or aircraft availability, and a carrier’s own risk assessment can move twice in a week. Anyone booked on a Moscow sector this autumn should have a refund path and a rebooking option confirmed in writing rather than assumed. Air Tanzania has handled the compensation side properly. The whiplash is the thing to plan around.

Sources: The Citizen (Tanzania), Russia Tourism News