It's been 6 years since Interjet ceased all operations and theese Sukhoi planes are still here

Interjet's fleet of Sukhoi Superjet 100 (SSJ100) aircraft has sat in long-term storage at Mexican airports — primarily Toluca International — for years, with some airframes grounded as early as 2018, well before the airline's final collapse in late 2020 and early 2021. The Mexican low-cost carrier operated approximately 22 SSJ100s alongside its Airbus A320 family fleet, but the Russian-built regional jets proved chronically difficult to keep airworthy outside of Russia. Parts supply chains for the SSJ100 were notoriously thin internationally, with Sukhoi Civil Aircraft — now absorbed into Russia's United Aircraft Corporation — never having built a robust global MRO support network comparable to Western OEMs. Many of Interjet's SSJ100s were effectively orphaned on the ramp years before the airline's formal insolvency, cannibalizing one another for serviceable components just to keep a diminishing portion of the fleet flyable.

The question of why these aircraft remain unsold rather than reabsorbed into the global used aircraft market has a layered answer. The SSJ100 has always had a shallow secondary market; the type's operational footprint outside of Russia and a handful of CIS carriers was never large, and international operators who experimented with it — including Interjet, Mexico's most prominent adopter — largely came away with cautionary tales about AOG events and parts lead times measured in months. Interjet's bankruptcy added further legal complexity, with liens, creditor claims, and court proceedings entangling title chains on individual airframes. Aircraft trapped in contested insolvency estates frequently cannot be remarketed until courts clear ownership — a process that in Latin American aviation bankruptcies can extend for years.

Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the sweeping Western sanctions that followed made the situation materially worse. Any prospective buyer of an SSJ100 — even a non-Western carrier — now faces extreme difficulty obtaining Russian aerospace components, accessing manufacturer technical support, or financing a purchase through institutions subject to OFAC or EU sanctions compliance obligations. Lessors and financiers that might otherwise have repossessed and remarketed the aircraft have effectively no viable customer base they can legally serve, further freezing the assets. The broader SSJ100 program itself has pivoted toward an entirely domestically sourced variant, the SSJ-New (now designated SJ-100), designed specifically to eliminate Western components after sanctions cut off supply — underscoring that the original SSJ100 is, from a commercial standpoint, a stranded platform.

For professional pilots and aviation operators, the Interjet SSJ100 graveyard is a concrete illustration of the fleet-selection risk associated with aircraft types that lack mature global support ecosystems. The type's technical qualities — modern avionics, comfortable cabin cross-section for a regional jet — were never the disqualifying factor; it was logistics. Airlines and flight departments evaluating narrowbody or regional jet acquisitions routinely apply scrutiny to OEM parts availability, AOG response time commitments, the depth of the MRO provider network, and the size of the global fleet providing economies of scale for spare parts pooling. The SSJ100 failed those tests in practice even before geopolitical risk was layered on top. The aircraft sitting in Toluca represent sunk capital that cannot be recovered under current conditions — a lesson that resonates particularly for Part 135 and Part 91K operators who sometimes consider non-traditional aircraft types with attractive acquisition prices but limited support infrastructure.

The broader trend these aircraft represent — the grounding and functional abandonment of entire fleets when OEM support collapses — is not unique to the SSJ100. Similar dynamics have played out with other types that had concentrated manufacturer ecosystems, insufficient operator bases to sustain third-party MRO, or geopolitical complications affecting supply. As sanctions regimes, supply chain fragility, and manufacturer consolidation continue to shape the aviation landscape, operators are increasingly scrutinizing not just the airworthiness of a proposed acquisition but the long-term supportability trajectory of the type. The Interjet SSJ100s, deteriorating on a Mexican ramp with no realistic path to commercial return, stand as a durable reference case for what happens when those factors are underweighted.