Turbojet engines designed for military and civil aviation are intended for flights at level from 9000 to 12000 m, where the air temperature is stable (minus 55 °C), and the air pres- sure corresponds to 150 mm Hg which is five times less than the atmospheric pressure at the surface of the Earth. It is shown that the AL-31ST gas turbine drive has a high sensitivity to the change in the temperature of the air entering the compressor. In the conditions of main gas pipelines compressor stations, in the territories with a continental and sharply continental climate, the air temperature varies greatly (for example, in the conditions of Bashkortostan during 24 hours, air temperature fluctuations can reach 18 °C), as a result of which the operation of the gas turbine engine is unstable, and the blades of high pressure turbine (HPT) experience overload and often break down. In the article, in order to determine the level of rational power loading of GPU-16R «Ufa», in the range of the boundary air temperatures with a deviation of ± 30 °C from the nominal value of 15 °C, at which the blade feather experiences the least load with bending moments, the AL-31ST drive has been recalculated to conditions of Earth-surface application. The analysis of differences between operating and nominal parameters is performed. A flow model of a rotor blade in the relative motion of a gas flow is created and the results of calculation in the form of velocity and pressure fields in the COMSOL Multiphysics 4 program are presented for the air temperature range from minus 15 oС to 45 oС. A signifi-cant difference in the modes is revealed, and the fact of HPT blades overload with bending moments is established, up to 5 % at the boundary temperatures. As a result, the hypothesis of specialists investigating the causes of breakage of the HPT blades was confirmed, that the breakage of the blades is associated with «... related fac-tors», and not «with defects of a metallurgical or casting nature». The HPT blade breaks from the material fatigue caused by periodic bending moments due to fluctuations in the outside air temperature, exceeding the permissible power load up to 5 % in the operating temperature range. Based on the analysis of the AL-31ST drive operation in the range of the outside air tem-perature limits (± 30 oС from the nominal temperature), it is recommended to maintain the operating mode of this drive of no more than 0.95 of the nominal load power.