Even last year, those wishing to travel to the then Ukrainian, and now Russian Crimea by air, bought tickets for planes landing in the main air harbor of the peninsula - Sevastopol airport. Today, due to the current situation in Ukraine, the air harbor is closed for passenger flights. However, the Russian authorities, as well as the citizens of the Russian Federation, who are accustomed to spending their holidays in the Crimea, hope that it will soon be possible to make regular flights here. Today we offer to get to know better what Sevastopol airport is.
Description
Sevastopol International Airport was created on the basis of a military airfield called Belbek. The air harbor is located on the Black Sea coast, on the territory of the Nakhimovsky district of the hero city of Sevastopol. The airport is closely adjacent to the small village of Lyubimovka. The distance from the air harbor to the city center is 11 km, to Simferopol - 50 km, to Y alta - 95 km.
History
The Sevastopol airport was founded in June 1941. Then it was a military airfield, where the fighter regiment of the Soviet Air Force was based. Union. After the end of World War II, the air harbor acquired a concrete runway (at first it was unpaved), but it continued to be used exclusively by military aircraft.
In the second half of the eighties, the airport runway was reconstructed and enlarged. This is due to the fact that in those days the air harbor was actively used by the first president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to his Crimean dacha in Foros. It was this reconstruction that allowed the airfield to receive civil aircraft in the future.
The Sevastopol airport accepted the first passenger flights in August 1993. They were organized by Omega Airlines LLC. Further work in this direction was continued by the GKP created in 1994 under the name "Airport Sevastopol". At that time, flights to Kyiv were made twice a week on An-24 aircraft, as well as charter flights on Il-18 aircraft.
In 2002, the object we are considering received the status of an international airport. Over the next five years, more than four thousand flights were carried out here, about half of which were carried out to international destinations. During this time, the main air harbor of Crimea was visited by more than fifty thousand passengers. However, in 2007, civil aircraft flights were suspended due to the refusal of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to renew the agreement on the joint use of the airfield.
Airport today
The operation of the airport resumed in the spring of 2010. Dniproavia and Aerosvit airlines began to operate regular flights from Kyiv to Moscow and Dnepropetrovsk. The grand opening of the renovated air harbor of Sevastopol took place on May 30, 2010
In February 2014, the airport "Belbek" ("Sevastopol") came under the control of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
Prospects
This spring, Maxim Sokolov, Minister of Transport of the Russian Federation, said that in the future, Sevastopol Airport will only accept charter and business flights. This is due to the fact that its capacity is only 100 people per hour, and the runway, despite its sufficient length (three thousand meters), is not designed for the increased loads associated with the landing and takeoff of large aircraft.
In the early summer of 2014, Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, signed a document on transport communication with Crimea, which, among other things, stipulates the inclusion of the Sevastopol air harbor in the list of joint airfields of the Russian Federation. The prime minister also instructed the relevant authorities to start preparing documentation on the possible modernization of the airport terminal and runway.
Sevastopol Airport: how to get there
From the air harbor to the city center can be reached by taxi or shuttle bus number 137, which ran everyhalf an hour. The cost of such a journey was approximately 35 rubles.
If you want to get to the airport "Sevastopol" from the northern part of the city, you will have to get there with transfers. First, you need to cross the Sevastopol Bay by boat (last year it cost about 9 rubles), and then by bus number 36 get directly to the air harbor. You will spend a little less than an hour on the road.
Sevastopol Airport: flights
Due to the fact that today the main air harbor of the Crimea is closed to civil aircraft, temporarily no passenger flights are made here. Also, shops, cafes are closed on the territory of the airport, and other infrastructure is not functioning.
