Traffic through Moscow airports continues double-digit growth

Iraqi Airways, one of the new carriers at Vnukovo, returned to the Russian capital after 17 years of absence (Leonid Faerberg / Transport-photo.com)

Passenger traffic through Moscow’s thee main airports continued to grow at a double-digit rate in September 2017.

Vnukovo and Domodedovo managed to beat the August figures, whereas Sheremetyevo showed a slight slowdown in dynamics: its traffic grew 15.7% year-on-year, against 18.3% in August.

Vnukovo served 1.906 million passengers in September. This was mostly down to the 815,400 passengers carried internationally, up 71.1% on the same period last year.

The most popular destinations outside Russia were Antalya, Larnaca, Pathos, Barcelona, Heraclion, Istanbul, Baku, Dushanbe, Tbilisi, and Chisinau.

The number of domestic passengers grew just 1.8%, to 1.910 million, with the most popular routes being to Sochi, Simferopol, Mineralnye Vody, Anapa, St. Petersburg, Makhachkala, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, and Surgut.

The overall growth was largely generated by the airport’s primary base carriers Rossiya Airlines (31.2% of the airport’s total traffic), UTair Aviation (28%), and Pobeda Airlines, as well as by Turkish Airlines.

New carriers came to Vnukovo in September: Russia’s Azimuth Airlines, Kazakhstan’s SCAT Airlines, and Iraqi Airways, which resumed flights to Moscow after a 17-year ban on air services between the two countries.

Domodedovo welcomed 3.1 million passengers in September; the international segment grew 18.1% to 1.5 million. Domestic traffic stayed roughly level year-on-year at 1.6 million passengers. The most popular domestic destinations included Krasnodar, Ufa, Kaliningrad, and Barnaul.

Finally, Moscow’s largest airport, Sheremetyevo, served 3.748 million passengers. In contrast to the general trend, the domestic segment outperformed the international one: 17% up year-on-year to 1.658 million passengers, against 14.7% up to 2.09 million, respectively.

The popular domestic destinations included St. Petersburg, Simferopol, Sochi, Yekaterinburg, and Krasnodar. The largest contributors to the September traffic growth were Aeroflot, NordWind, Royal Flight, Pegas Fly, Air France, and Air Astana.
 
In the first nine months of the year, Vnukovo’s traffic climbed 33.2% year-on-year to 13.934 million passengers. The figures for Domodedovo were up 8% to over 24 million. Sheremetyevo continued in the lead both by the absolute traffic numbers and by the growth rate: up 18.4% to 30.253 million.