Azerbaijan’s airports served a record number of passengers in 2019

37 passenger airlines operated flights to more than 60 destinations from Baku Heydar Aliyev International Airport last year (AZAL)

Azerbaijan’s international airports recorded a collective total of 5.56 million passengers last year, with the 4.73 million bulk of them passing through the Caucasus country’s main gateway of Baku’s Heydar Aliyev International Airport (IATA: GYD). 2019 was therefore another record year for the capital city airport, with a seven per cent improvement on 2018.

Passenger traffic has also grown at the country’s second busiest airport of Nakhchivan (646,000 passengers, 1.5 per cent more year-on-year), and the third largest, the airport of Ganja (154,000, 10 per cent up). Lankaran (18,000 passengers) grew by 14.5 per cent on the previous year.

In 2019, Baku airport’s base carriers, state-owned AZAL (Azerbaijan Airlines) and its low-cost division Buta Airways, respectively carried two million and 602,000 passengers.

The number of passengers on international flights through GYD amounted to 4.1 million people last year. In addition to the national carriers, the top-10 airlines included Turkish Airlines (Turkey, 492,000 passengers), FlyDubai (UAE, 237,000), Aeroflot (Russia, 193,000), AirArabia (UAE, 169,000), UIA (Ukraine, 124,000), Qatar Airways (Qatar, 106,000), Lufthansa (Germany, 66,000) and SCAT (Kazakhstan, 62,000).

In 2019, 37 passenger airlines operated flights to more than 60 destinations from Heydar Aliyev International Airport.

Baku airport, which is part of the AZAL ownership structure, is the region’s largest hub in terms of both passenger and freight traffic and the number of take-off and landing operations, whilst offering the largest airport terminal area and the most capacity in its cargo complex.