All about the airports of Crimea

For many decades Crimea has been considered the closest and one of the most convenient and accessible resort areas for citizens of most of Russia and some other post-Soviet states. After 2014, there was an acute problem with how to get to the peninsula, and today aviation remains the most convenient option, especially since they have worked on the development of air traffic. In this case, you need to figure out exactly how to get here.

If we pay attention only to the official statistics, it may seem that in the relatively small Crimea there are enough airports to get to any corner of its territory. In practice, everything turns out to be much more complicated, so let's briefly go through all the airports.

• International airport in Simferopol - the main air gates of Crimea. It is the only airfield that receives regular civilian passenger flights. Due to the fact that after 2014 it became a strategic infrastructure facility on the peninsula, it was reconstructed and its main capacities were greatly increased - this airport receives aircrafts from about 70 directions during the season, and in 2017 it served more than 5 million passengers. At the same time, its international status is conditional - because of the sanctions, they fly here only from Russia.

From here there are good transport links with all corners of the Crimea. By the way, the much-hyped Crimean Wave, opened in 2018, is not a separate airport, as even some media mistakenly reported, but just a new terminal at Simferopol airport.

• Belbek airport near Sevastopol can be considered the second airport in Crimea, if only because it also retains its international status. However, this is even more conditional than in Simferopol - today it is a purely military airfield, which only occasionally receives charter flights. A small number of regular routes were established until 2014, after which talks about the activation of passenger air traffic remained just talk.

• The second airport of Simferopol, "Zavodskoe", on the map can be found southwest of the city. For arriving tourists, it is not interesting, since recently it has been used only for flights of rescuers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and rare training of parachutists. The prospects for this airfield are very vague, it is possible that in the coming years it will completely disappear.

• Airport in Kerch, also known as Voikovo, in Soviet times had an important regional status, until 2014 there were attempts to organize regular passenger flights here. In recent years, despite discussions on the possibility of full load of runways, the airport has been in decline, and only in 2018 began to gradually accept individual charters.

As becomes obvious from the above list, the Simferopol International Airport for the average tourist, whose pockets are not puffed up by the millions stored there, is the only aviation destination in Crimea.

If we discard seasonal flights during the warmer months, then the number of airlines and flights, of course, will decrease. Consider the main destinations where you can fly from Simferopol.

• Moscow. Capital airports attract the maximum amount of attention, even in winter there is no problem getting there. Regular flights on a year-round basis to Vnukovo are operated by Azimut, Gazprom Avia, Rossiya and Yakutia airlines. You can get to Domodedovo through the efforts of Alrosa, S7 Airlines, Red Wings Airlines, Ural Airlines and Globus. In the case of Sheremetyevo, the choice of carriers is relatively modest - only Aeroflot, Pegas Fly or Nordwind Airlines. You can also fly through the Zhukovsky airport - such a service is provided by Ural Airlines.

• St. Petersburg. Regular communication with the Northern capital, despite its enormous size and great importance for the country, is established on a much smaller scale than with Moscow. All year round only Nordwind Airlines, Rossiya, Ural Airlines and Yamal fly there; in the summer season, the range of carriers increases, but not globally.

• Cities of the European part of Russia. This is where the difference between year-round and seasonal traffic is especially noticeable - the intensity of flights in summer here increases by 2-3 times. There are not so many flights all year round. Oddly enough, Simferopol is best connected to Sochi - even in winter both Aeroflot and Nordwind Airlines fly there, which is apparently caused by the properties of the southernmost airport in Russia as a major interchange hub. The rest of the destinations available without transfers all year round are Mineralnye Vody (Azimut), Arkhangelsk (Nordavia), Izhevsk (Izhavia) and Kazan (UVT Aero).

• The cities of the Asian part of Russia. The significant remoteness of Crimea from these edges leads to the fact that only for the largest local cities it makes sense to organize a permanent and year-round passenger service. Direct flights connect Simferopol even in winter with only three local cities - Yekaterinburg (Ural Airlines), Tyumen (Yamal) and Novosibirsk (Globus).At the same time, here, in the summer, the number of flights, as well as the variety of carriers and destinations, grow many times over.

Cities to which there are year-round flights from Simferopol may also have additional seasonal connections, including by other airlines. We will not mention them again, but just look at the airlines that provide seasonal flights to destinations that have never been mentioned above:

• Azimut - Krasnodar and Rostov-on-Don;

• Alrosa - Tomsk;

• Pegas Fly - Barnaul, Belgorod, Irkutsk, Kirov, Nizhnevartovsk, Nizhnekamsk, Orenburg, Chelyabinsk and Saratov;

• Nordavia - Murmansk, Ivanovo, Volgograd and Cheboksary;

• Nordwind Airlines - an impressive list of one and a half dozen destinations in the European (Volgograd, Krasnodar, Voronezh and so on) and Asian (Krasnoyarsk, Novokuznetsk, Khabarovsk and other) parts of the country;

• Red Wings Airlines - more than 10 destinations throughout the country, including Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, Perm and Samara;

• Izhavia - Penza, Nizhnekamsk;

• "Russia" - up to 10 seasonal destinations, mainly in the European part or in the Urals;

• Severstal - Cherepovets;

• Ural Airlines - about a dozen summer destinations, most of which are focused on the Urals and Siberia;

• UVT Aero - Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Samara, Surgut, Ufa;

• Yamal - Nizhnevartovsk, Novy Urengoy, Salekhard, Surgut, Khanty-Mansiysk;

• RusLine - Kaluga, Voronezh, Kursk, Lipetsk, Tambov;

• Kostroma aviation enterprise - Kostroma.

Numerous distributors are engaged in the sale of air tickets, while the average user can choose any of them - the one he considers most convenient for himself. If you want to purchase tickets without an extra charge, and at the same time study in detail the schedule and conditions of flights, it is most reasonable to purchase travel documents on the website of the airline that you have chosen as a carrier. Today it is quite easy to do it even with the help of the Internet, but if you suddenly live near an airport or an airline office, you can also come for a ticket in person.

If you are going to fly to Simferopol from a large city, which is connected with the departure point by several flights of different airlines, it makes sense to go to some air ticket aggregator like Aviasales or Kiwi.

If your airport on the selected date is not connected by any direct flight to Simferopol, the resource will calculate the possible transfer options and will also make it easy to compare them with each other in all respects. As a rule, when choosing the option you like, such a site allows you to immediately book or buy tickets, or redirects you to the carrier's website, where there will be such an opportunity.

In the "real" world, such a service is provided by many travel agencies, which, even in our information age, perform the functions of railway and air ticket offices. This option is good for those who do not like to use the Internet too much or are afraid to pay money, and then confuse something and be left without a ticket. Of course, when buying through a tour operator, the cost of the flight will be slightly higher for you, but here the advantage is that you are not assigned any organizational duties - they will do everything for you, and you can be sure of the professional support of the trip.

At the same time, experienced travelers are advised to understand the issue before purchasing anything. For example, Moscow has three (or even four, if you count Zhukovsky) airports, and it seems logical to fly away from the one to which you live closer. At the same time, there is a pattern according to which a flight from Sheremetyevo is usually more expensive than a similar flight from Domodedovo, so sometimes it makes sense to overpay for a taxi, saving on the cost of an air ticket.

At least 90% of tourists arriving at the Simferopol airport immediately leave it, heading mainly to the southern coast of Crimea or to other seaside cities. For this reason, the question arises about the method of transfer to the final destination of the trip.

We must say right away that car rental or a taxi ride are quite real options if you do not spare money, but you need to understand that such a decision can significantly increase the budget for the entire vacation. For this reason, it makes sense to use public transport, which, due to the huge popularity of the Simferopol airport, runs smoothly here.

Intercity buses can be caught right outside the passenger terminal - they are called Fly and Bus. Their schedule is directly related to the airport schedule - they leave here the moment the plane arrives, and the passengers who got off have managed to leave the terminal and get on the bus. The express also travels in the opposite direction - it tries to arrive by the time when its passengers still have time to go through all the airport procedures. Given the congestion of the airport, buses simply run with a high frequency; they go to relatively small settlements a little less often, being tied to the most popular flights.

Many have heard that Crimea is almost the only place in the world where a trolleybus can travel tens of kilometers from one city to another. From Simferopol you can take a trolleybus to Yalta and Alushta, as well as numerous resort villages between them, and there is even a trolleybus stop near the Simferopol air terminal, but here it should be borne in mind that there are no direct intercity trolleybus routes from the airport - from here the "horned" will take you only to the Crimean capital Cities.

If you absolutely need to get to Simferopol itself, then you can use both the services of intercity buses (they have numbers) and a taxi. The distance to the center is about 14 kilometers, while public transport runs even at night.

You will learn more about the new terminal of Simferopol airport from the video.