Transaero boosts domestic passenger traffic 41% in Jan-Feb
MOSCOW. March 30 (Interfax) - Transaero carried 41% more passengers on domestic flights in the first two months of 2012 than it did a year earlier, Russia's second largest airline told Interfax on Thursday.
The airline's domestic passenger traffic grew by 32% in 2011, while growth on international routes measured 26%. The carrier launched 33 new domestic routes in the past four years, and last year it carried 270% more passengers on domestic flights than it did in 2007.
Transaero said that this summer season it will triple compared to 2011 the number of direct international flights from Russia's regions, bypassing the airports of Moscow and St. Petersburg, to 45. It will for the first time conduct international flights from cities such as Arkhangelsk, Volgograd, Nizhny Novgorod, Tyumen and Chelyabinsk.
Last year, the company launched direct flights from eight cities: Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Perm, Rostov, Samara and Ufa.
Starting in the summer season of 2012, Transaero will fly domestic routes out of Moscow's Vnukovo airport. Passengers can already buy tickets for Transaero flights out of Vnukovo to Blagoveshchensk, Magadan and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. These flights will be in addition to those Transaero already flies to these destinations from Moscow's Domodedovo airport.
The number of Transaero flights out of Vnukovo will increase considerably in the fall and winter of 2012.
Transaero, founded in 1990, began flying in November 1991. In 2011, the company was ranked among the five safest airlines in Europe and among the 15 safest in the world by JACDEC (Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre).
Transaero has been the biggest carrier in Russia's Far East since 2009. The company is actively involved in the government program of subsidized travel for residents of the Far East, and in 2009-2011 carried more than 231,000 Far East passengers travelling on subsidized tickets, the highest figure among all the airlines participating in the program.
Transaero was the first and so far the only Russian carrier to use wide-body Boeing 747-400s and Boeing 777 airliners on its domestic flights, particularly to the Far East. This offers the company's passengers a choice of four classes, making it possible to meet the needs of all types of customers.
The company is continually creating high-skill, high-wage jobs in various Russian regions. In 2010-2011 alone, Transaero created 4,000 new jobs. Almost one in ten Transaero employees now works at the company's regional divisions, which cover 23 Russian cities.
The company has a fleet of 76 aircraft, including 19 Boeing 747s, eleven Boeing 777s, 14 Boeing 767s, 29 Boeing 737s and three Tu-214s. Transaero has the largest fleet of wide-body, long-distance airliners in Russia, the CIS and Eastern Europe, and is the only carrier in this region to operate Boeing 747 and Boeing 777-300 passenger jets.
Transaero's route network covers more than 160 destinations in Russia and in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa.