The idea of a civil airport near Sevastopol was not completely buried
Strategic missile carriers and long-range bombers will coexist with passenger aircraft at the Belbek airfield near Sevastopol.
The double use of the airfield was announced today in Simferopol by the special representative of the Russian President on environmental issues, ecology and transport Sergei Ivanov.
“As far as I know, work has begun on the reconstruction of the second runway of the Simferopol airport. Work has also begun at the Sevastopol Belbek airport to extend the runway. Of course, the military will have priority there. But civil aircraft, in their free time from combat training, will be able, if it is economically profitable, to land in Sevastopol, and not in Simferopol,” Ivanov said.
In July, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported that the construction of a second runway at Belbek was being completed. The bulk of the work is planned to be completed by the end of this year, and not only the military airfield itself is being modernized, but also the infrastructure facilities that ensure its functioning. At the same time, the military department emphasized that they were modernizing the airfield for strategic aviation.
After Sevastopol became part of Russia, it was assumed that Belbek would become a military-civil airfield. For its modernization, 1,7 billion rubles were allocated as part of the federal target program for the development of Crimea and Sevastopol and money from private investors.
The governor of Sevastopol, Dmitry Ovsyannikov, who came in 2016, acted as an active lobbyist for the construction of a civil airport. He believed that Belbek would be able to receive up to 500-600 thousand passengers a year. Design work and an unsuccessful search for investors began.
However, these efforts came into conflict with the interests of the investor of the Simferopol airport, who did not want to have a competitor on the peninsula. As a result, in 2018 it was officially announced that a civilian airport would not be built near Sevastopol, and a military airfield would occasionally receive VIP passenger flights.
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