Independent carrier Transaero Airlines is to launch a link between the Russian capital and Komsomolsk-on-Amur an important industrial centre within Khabarovsk Krai the Russian Far East. The link will launch from March 30, 2015 and will serve Domodedovo International Airport in Moscow.

Transaero’s new itinerary will be the only scheduled offering between the two cities and will represent the first scheduled link since Yakutia ended a short-lived Boeing 757 operation on the route in January 2014 after just three months of service. Prior to that S7 Airlines had served the route in 2012 and Vladivostok Air between July 2008 and October 2011.

Komsomolsk-on-Amur has a diversified economy where machine building, metallurgy and timber enterprises dominate. It has strong transport heritage and is home to aircraft assembler Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Production Association (KnAAPO) and ship building enterprise Amurskiy Sudostroitelnyy Zavod.

Transaero will initially offer two flights per week between Moscow and Komsomolsk-on-Amur but will increase the frequency of the service to four times weekly from May 23, 2015. The airline has been offering flights to Khabarovsk Krai since July 2007 and has carried nearly 1.5 million passengers on its Moscow-Khabarovsk route since its inauguration almost eight years ago.

This will be one of only a few routes scheduled to be flown by Transaero Airlines using its Tupolev Tu-214 fleet. The type is a derivative of the Tu-204 and was manufactured at the KAPO production facility in Kazan. It is effectively a higher gross weight version of the Tu-204, with an additional over-wing emergency exit and extra fuel tanks. Like its predecessor the type was not the commercial success it had been hoped and examples are currently only flown by Transaero and the Russian government carrier, Rossiya, many in ‘Special Missions’ configuration.

Transaero first introduced the type into its fleet in April 2007 and subsequently added to further examples in November 2008 and October 2009. According to OAG Schedules Analyser, the airline currently deploys the type on domestic links and mainly international leisure routes from Moscow Domodedovo.

These include flights over the first quarter of this year to Adler/Sochi, Blagoveschensk, Bratsk, Chita, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Ulan-Ude and Yakutsk in the domestic market and Antalya, Barcelona, Hurghada, Ovda, Sharm-el-Sheikh, Simferopol, Tenerife in the international market.

The new service will further expand Transaero’s domestic offering as it seeks to further strengthen its activities within the Russian Federation. The carrier boosted its domestic offering by almost a fifth in 2014 (up 19.2 per cent), increasing its share of local capacity from 8.3 per cent to 9.0 per cent. It is currently the fourth largest domestic carrier in Russia behind market leader Aeroflot Russian Airlines and S7 Airlines and UTair.

The chart, below, highlights the growth in Transaero's domestic capacity over the past ten years.