Air communication with Crimea will be closed until May 19

The Federal Air Transport Agency has extended the ban on the operation of airports in the South of Russia until May 19.

Most likely, Crimea will enter the high holiday season with the only access to the peninsula via the Crimean Bridge, and holidaymakers need to worry about train and bus tickets in advance, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

Experts advise not to count on the resumption of air traffic until the military administrations of the regions of Ukraine bordering Russia: Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolaev, Kherson and Zaporozhye have completely come under the control of the military administrations. In this case, the ability of the Ukrainian air defense system to hit civilian aircraft will be excluded. Until then, access to the Crimean coast is only by land.

Airlines have already sent messages to passengers about the cancellation of flights for May-June. This was followed by cancellations of reservations, which Rostourism tried to refute, citing the occupancy of hotels and sanatoriums in Crimea at least 50%. However, a year ago, the average occupancy rate of operating accommodation facilities exceeded 70%; in some regions this figure exceeded 80-85%. In general, for May 2021 the official tourist flow amounted to 520 thousand people, which became a record for the post-Soviet period.

This year, 333 thousand people made it to Crimea for May. The region's Ministry of Resorts and Tourism hastened to compare these figures with 2019 to show a positive trend of 10%. However, a simple mathematical calculation shows a loss of 40% of tourist traffic, which proves the disproportion between railway and air passenger traffic.

In the first 10 days of May last year, Simferopol airport served 190 thousand people, receiving and departing 200 flights per day. It is impossible to compensate for such a volume by rail, especially since the journey from Moscow and back will take three days of vacation. And no matter how hard railway workers try to increase the capacity of trains by adding cars to trains, they will not be able to become an alternative to airplanes.

“Despite the objective logistical problems of organizing tourist flows that arose in connection with the partial closure of air traffic in the Southern Federal District, the holiday season will take place,” assured the head of Crimea Sergei Aksenov. “Therefore, our main task, together with the federal authorities, is to jointly ensure the safety of residents and guests of the peninsula.”

In addition to security, the Crimean authorities will have to resolve the issue of transport accessibility. Large resort complexes organize transfers for their guests from Stavropol, the closest operating airport to Crimea. Another one, Adler Airport, is already overloaded during the holiday season in order to take on part of the Crimean traffic.

As for the railway, in addition to the shortage of cars, there are limitations in the capacity of the line from Kerch to Dzhankoy. Previously, it was used only for the route to Kerch, and one track cannot cope with the increasing traffic of trains to the mainland. There remains a bus route from the Anapa railway station using a single ticket, which was practiced for delivering passengers before the launch of the Crimean Bridge railway line.