Ukraine’s SkyUp carries 668,500 passengers in six months

The start-up hybrid carrier’s share of scheduled traffic continues to rise (SkyUp)

Ukrainian start-up carrier SkyUp Airlines served 668,500 passengers in the first six months of 2019, with 72 per cent using the airline’s charter service, which translates to 484,846. Although the carrier’s share of scheduled traffic was relatively low at 28 per cent, the airline says this share will continue to grow, after it increased the number of its scheduled flights from two in January to 31 in June.

The most popular scheduled destinations in SkyUp’s network so far this year are Barcelona, Tbilisi, Batumi, Alicante and Larnaca. Most passengers on charter flights traveled to Sharm-el-Sheikh, Hurghada, Marsa-el-Alam (all three in Egypt), Antalya in Turkey and Monastir in Tunisia.

SkyUp currently operates a fleet of eight Boeing 737NGs, including two 149-seat -700s and six 189-seat -800s, including one dedicated standby aircraft. The average number of passengers per flight in the six months was 166, a period which also produced an average flight time per aircraft of 460 hours per month. The airline specifies that this figure does not factor in the grounding periods for the reconfiguration of several aircraft and also excludes the back-up aircraft. Thus, each of the aircraft in operation spent more than 15 hours a day in the sky.

SkyUp’s average fleet age is 11.5 years, making it the youngest in the Ukraine.

Based at Kyiv, SkyUp operates as both a charter and a scheduled low-cost carrier, having commenced operations on 21 May, 2018, using an all-Boeing fleet on domestic and international services.