Chelyabinsk International Airport served 1,827,951 passengers by the end of 2021, which is 57 per cent more than it was at the end of 2020, according to the airport management on Wednesday, February 9, 2022.
“By the end of 2021, a new record in passenger traffic has been achieved at the I. V. Kurchatov Airport. Last year, 1,827,951 passengers were served. This is 6 per cent more than in the pre-pandemic 2019, and 57 per cent more than in 2020,” the airport representative said.
He added that the most popular destinations for domestic airline passengers in 2021 were Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Simferopol, Novosibirsk, and Krasnodar.
“According to the plan, passenger traffic in 2022 will exceed 2 million passengers. Growth by 2021 is expected to reach 9 per cent due to the restoration of international traffic to pre-crisis values and an increase in the volume of subsidized flights,” the representative told.
Chelyabinsk International Airport named after I. V. Kurchatov is one of the most intensively developing airports of federal significance and the largest transit hub in the Southern Urals on routes connecting Europe and Asia.
On January 26, 2021, the grand opening of the Chelyabinsk International Airport took place after its reconstruction and rebranding. The airport was named after an outstanding native of the region and the founding father of the domestic nuclear industry, Igor Kurchatov, who originated the Soviet atomic project on Chelyabinsk land. It is Kurchatov whom Russians call the “father” of the Soviet atomic bomb. Also, he was the founder and first director of the Atomic Energy Institute.
As for the Chelyabinsk airport, it received its new name following the results of the All-Russian contest “Great Names of Russia”. The idea of the contest was to assign the names of outstanding compatriots to the country’s major airports by popular vote.
Ru-Main, 09.02.2022
Source: TASS
