All about the airports of Crimea

For many decades, Crimea has been considered the nearest and one of the most convenient and accessible resort areas for the 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 you pay attention only to the official statistics, it may seem that there are enough airports in a relatively small Crimea to reach every corner of its territory. In practice, everything turns out to be much more complicated, so we will go through all the airports in short.

• Simferopol International Airport - The main air gate of the Crimea. This is the only airfield that receives regular passenger civil flights. Due to the fact that after 2014 it became a strategic infrastructure facility on the peninsula, it was reconstructed and greatly increased its main capacity - during the season, this airport takes about 70 destinations, and in 2017 it served more than 5 million passengers. At the same time, its international status is conditional - because of sanctions, only Russia flies here.

From here, good transport links are established with all corners of the Crimea. By the way, the “Crimean Wave” advertised, opened in 2018, is not a separate airport, as some media mistakenly reported, but just a new terminal of Simferopol Airport.

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

• The second airport of Simferopol, "Factory"The map can be found southwest of the city. For arriving tourists it is uninteresting, since recently it is used only for departures of rescuers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and rare training of parachutists. The prospects of 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, it had an important regional status. Until 2014, there were attempts to organize regular passenger flights. In recent years, despite the discussion of the possibility of full load runways, the airport was in decline, and only in 2018 began to gradually take individual charters.

As it becomes apparent from the above list, Simferopol International Airport for the average tourist, whose pockets do not bristle with the millions stored there, is the only aviation destination in the Crimea.

If we reject seasonal flights during the warm season, the number of airlines and flights will, of course, 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 in getting there. Regular flights on a year-round basis at Vnukovo are operated by Azimut, Gazprom Avia, Russia and Yakutia airlines. You can get to Domodedovo by 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 still fly through the airport "Zhukovsky" - this service is provided by Ural Airlines.

• St. Petersburg. Regarding the northern capital, despite its huge size and great importance for the country, regular communication has been established on a much smaller scale than with Moscow. All year round, only Nordwind Airlines, Russia, 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 particularly noticeable - the intensity of flights in the summer here increases by 2-3 times. All year round there are not so many flights here. Strangely 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 Russia's southernmost airport as a major transit hub. The remaining destinations that are available all year round without change are Mineralnye Vody (Azimut), Arkhangelsk (Nordavia), Izhevsk (Izhavia) and Kazan (YuVT Aero).

• Cities of the Asian part of Russia. The considerable remoteness of the 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. Even in winter, direct flights connect Simferopol with only three local cities - Yekaterinburg (“Ural Airlines”), Tyumen (“Yamal”) and Novosibirsk (“Globus”). At the same time, here in summer, the number of flights, as well as the diversity of carriers and destinations, grow many times.

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

• 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 a dozen items in the European (Volgograd, Krasnodar, Voronezh, and so on) and Asian (Krasnoyarsk, Novokuznetsk, Khabarovsk and others) 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 areas, 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;

• “YuVT Aero” - Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Samara, Surgut, Ufa;

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

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

• Kostroma airline - Kostroma.

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

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

If your airport at the selected date is not connected with any Simferopol direct flight, the resource will calculate the possible transfer options and also make it easy to compare them among themselves 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 site of the carrier itself, where it will be possible.

In the “real” world, many travel companies provide this service, which even in our information age perform the functions of railway and air ticket offices. This option is good for those who are not too fond of using the Internet or are afraid to pay money, and then make a mess of something and stay without a ticket. Of course, when buying through a tour operator, the cost of the flight for you will be a little higher, but here the advantage is that you are not charged with 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 sort out the issue before acquiring anything. For example, Moscow has three (or even four, if we 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 usually costs more than a similar flight from Domodedovo, so sometimes it makes sense to overpay for a taxi, saving on airfare.

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

Just say that car rental or a taxi ride - these are very real options, if you do not regret money, but you need to understand that such a decision can significantly increase the budget of the entire vacation. For this reason, it makes sense to use public transport, which, due to the immense popularity of the Simferopol airport, runs smoothly here.

Intercity buses can be caught right near the passenger terminal - they are called Fly and Bus. Their schedule is directly related to the airport timetable - they leave from here at the moment when the plane arrived, and the passengers who got off it managed to get out of the terminal and get on the bus. The same express train travels in the opposite direction - it tries to arrive at the time when its passengers still have time to go through all airport procedures. Considering the airport’s workload, the buses simply ply with great frequency, they go to relatively small localities a little less often, becoming attached to the most demanded flights.

Many have heard that the Crimea is perhaps the only place in the world where a trolley bus can travel tens of kilometers from one city to another. From Simferopol you can take a trolley bus 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 you need to take into account that there are no direct trolleybus intercity routes from the airport - from here the “horned ones” will take you only to the Crimea capital Cities.

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

Details about the new terminal airport Simferopol you will learn from the video.