RuAviation

Construction of the new terminal of Vitus Bering International Airport of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (Yelizovo) has reached the final stage, by the end of this year it is planned to complete the main construction works. The start of passenger and aircraft service is scheduled for April 2025. Vladimir Solodov, Governor of the Kamchatka Territory, told about it in an interview with Interfax on the margins of the Eastern Economic Forum.

The airport, which will be, according to the project leaders, one of the most beautiful in the country, includes not only an air terminal, but also a hotel complex for 120-130 rooms, as well as a congress and exhibition centre.

‘Everything on the airport will be completed by December 2024. Some of the work on the convention and exhibition centre and hotel complex will continue in the first quarter of 2025. I expect that from April we will transfer all flights to the new airport. First, there will be test flights and testing of all procedures, testing of all services. After everything will be worked out, most likely, all flights will be transferred to the new terminal’, – said the head of the region.

After the reconstruction is completed, Yelizovo airport will become one of the largest in the Far East with a capacity of 1,145 passengers per hour or 1.5 million per year. In May 2021, as part of a working trip to the Far East, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko visited Yelizovo airport and suggested that, taking into account the planned growth of tourist traffic to Kamchatka, the project should be adjusted to double the terminal’s capacity to 3 million passengers per year.

Passenger traffic at the airport grows by about 10% annually, in 2023 the airport served more than 900 thousand people for the first time – it is 8% more than in 2022. It is planned to increase passenger traffic and expand the geography of flights at the expense of base carriers. Currently, negotiations are underway with Aeroflot, Aurora, Rossiya and S7 Airlines to open new destinations from Yelizovo. In addition, negotiations have been initiated with the PRC authorities to discuss and create conditions for organising direct flights to China.