Russia’s Aurora Airlines’ passenger traffic grows five per cent in nine months

Aeroflot Group’s Far Eastern regional airline transported 1.255 million passengers in the period from January to September of this year (Aurora)

Aurora Airlines, an Aeroflot Group regional subsidiary operating in the Far East of Russia, carried some 1.255 million passengers during the first nine months of 2018, up five per cent on the same period last year.

The airline’s domestic traffic grew by five per cent year-on-year to 941,494 passengers, whilst the international segment increased by four per cent to 314,000 in the period. Meanwhile, the carrier’s average seat load factor improved by 3.4 percentage points to 76.6 per cent.

In the nine-month period, Aurora, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in September, operated 18,631 flights, of which 14,569 were within and 4,062 outside of Russia. The airline’s RPKs also showed improvement, up by six per cent to 1.947 million RPKs and the passenger airline also carried 5,788 tonnes of cargo.

Aurora, which is 51 per cent owned by Aeroflot, with the remaining 49 held by the administration of the Sakhalin region, was created in 2013 by the merger of struggling local carriers SAT Airlines and Vladivostok Avia, in response to a government order. IOSA-certified, it currently operates a fleet of 24 aircraft: 10 Airbus А319s, 11 Bombardier DHC-8s and three de Havilland DHC-6s.

Russia’s 14th largest carrier by passenger traffic, it now performs international scheduled flights to Seoul, Pusan, Harbin, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sapporo, and among its domestic destinations are Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Magadan, Yakutsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Blagoveschesk, Tynda, Nikolaevsk-on-Amur and Neryungri. Aurora also operates state-subsidised air links serving the cities of both the Sakhalin and Primorsky regions.