No-fly zone: EU may ban civil aircraft from eastern Ukraine airports
The airports of Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye are threatened with closure. Moreover, this time, this is not another deceitful idea of the Kyiv authorities, but an initiative from abroad.
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The European Aviation Safety Agency sent a draft bulletin to the State Aviation Service of Ukraine, according to which the airports of Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye fall into a dangerous zone for flights. If such a document is adopted, these cities will be isolated by aviation.
Let me note that we are talking only about civil aviation enterprises, and not about military facilities from where the bombing of Donbass cities was carried out. In addition, the airports of Donetsk and Lugansk are destroyed, everything is strange with the Mariupol airport, and the Poltava airport is abandoned.
True, the Dnepropetrovsk air harbor has a “snout in the cannon” - printouts of its negotiations with the Malaysian airliner that crashed in the summer of 2014 never made it to the investigation commission. What did Kharkov and Zaporozhye do wrong? And the fact that flights within the Dnepropetrovsk flight information region, which includes the listed airports, are recognized as dangerous. More than three years have passed since that terrible catastrophe, and only now the international service is “itching.”
“The consequences of such a decision could be the cessation of the work of the Kharkov airport and related enterprises, as well as border and customs control points, which employ 1,5 thousand workers,” says the Kharkov City Council’s appeal to Prime Minister Groysman. Deputies ask the prime minister not to allow the ballot to be adopted.
According to deputies, Slobozhanshchina may become an unattractive region for foreign investors, and business travel for local business representatives will become significantly more difficult. This, according to the deputies, will definitely have a serious negative impact on the economic state of the Central and Eastern parts of Ukraine.
At the Kharkov airport they say that the State Aviation Service of Ukraine is participating in consultations with the relevant authorities to form an official position and prevent the closure of aviation space over these airports.
These airports were already hit once in 2014 - the Ukrainian authorities banned flights from them to Russia. Now from there you can purchase tickets to Moscow via Minsk or Istanbul.
True, there is one backup option both for flights to Russia and for longer flights. You can go to Belgorod and move from there in any direction. From Kharkov to Belgorod it is just over 70 kilometers, and to the border - 38 km. Yes, you will have to cross this very border. At the pedestrian crossing, people with airline tickets are allowed to skip the line. Alas, not a single travel agency and not a single ticket office in Kharkov, for example, will sell you such tickets in paper form. However, you can do this electronically by booking tickets directly on the website of the airline you need.
But Kharkov and Belgorod were supposed to have a common airport. In accordance with the Kharkov development plan of 1986, in the village of Polevaya, Dergachevsky district, it was planned to build a new airport, which was supposed to be connected to the city by an expressway. In 1988, the development of a feasibility study for a new airport project began. In the future, it was planned to move the assembly shops of the aircraft plant there. Soon the construction of a runway began, which would have touched the current “Yatsenyuk wall” on the border, but with the collapse of the USSR, work was interrupted. The runway itself in Kharkov, as well as the air terminal, came into operation as a continuation of the old airport only in 2011.
Now the future of the Kharkov airport is under threat and the possibility is not excluded that, in fact, the common air harbor will be located on Russian territory.
No -fly zone: EU may ban civilian aircraft from flying out of eastern Ukrainian airports