With the rapid expansion of flights to, from, and within the region, the aviation industry is beginning to transform Central Asia.
For all the talk of infrastructure corridors, the real transport success story of the last few years in Central Asia has been in the air. Driven particularly by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, every month new flight routes are announced, connecting Central Asia’s fast-growing economies with the world, and with each other, The Caspian Post reports citing The Diplomat.
That said, such growth has not been without obstacles. The war in Ukraine and the resultant sanctions on Moscow have caused chaos for some carriers. Airlines have responded by diversifying, leaning heavily into the Asian market, while domestic routes are also booming.
But could the aviation industry also play a role in creating a more unified Central Asia?
When the war in Ukraine broke out, it threw the much of the Northern Hemisphere’s aviation market into turmoil. One of the first reactions of Western countries was to ban Russian airlines from flying over their airspace. The Kremlin responded in kind. Even airlines that were neither Western nor Russian ran into problems with insurance.
“With the withdrawal of insurance coverage for commercial flights to, from, and over Russia, we had to suspend usage of Russian airspace since March 2022, and obviously, it affected on all European flights, as they became longer,” Yerbolat Baisalykov, Air Astana’s senior vice president of Revenue Management and Commercial Planning, told The Diplomat.
As an example, a flight from Astana to Frankfurt now takes almost an hour longer than it did before February 2022.
Some airlines have persevered. As a state-run airline, Uzbekistan Airways has fewer worries about insurance and has continued flying over Russia to Europe. After Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was shot down on approach to Grozny earlier this year, Uzbekistan Airways also briefly began rerouting flights over Turkiye.
Indeed, Turkish aviation has been the principal beneficiary of the situation. The closure of Russian airspace and the loss of Russian carriers means that many travelers who had traditionally traveled via Moscow now choose to transit in Istanbul before flying onward to Europe. Carriers such as Pegasus, Turkish Airlines, and AJet are seeing their passenger numbers shoot up.
“We’ve observed a clear increase in transit traffic between Europe and Central Asia since 2022, particularly as Istanbul has become a key hub,” said Emre Pekesen, sales and network planning group director at Pegasus Airlines. “We’ve expanded our capacity in CIS Region especially in Kazakhstan, and grown across Europe, which in turn has driven up the number of transit passengers.”
This has seen Istanbul shoot up the rankings of the world’s most visited cities. Pre-pandemic, it ranked eighth, with 13.4 million visitors, whereas by 2024 it had risen to second with 23 million, behind only Bangkok.
Pegasus is eyeing up opportunities to expand. Pekesen expressed the airline’s eagerness to launch flights to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, markets which they do not currently serve. “However, the current bilateral air service agreements between Turkiye and these countries do not allow us to operate flights. We are actively engaged in discussions to expand traffic rights and improve market access,” he said.
Looking South and East Meanwhile, European destinations have lost some of their allure: the cost of travel and the difficulty of obtaining a Schengen visa mean few have the resources for such trips. Meanwhile, travel to nearby countries in Asia has exploded - and Central Asia is reaping the benefits. According to Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Tourism and Sports, 655,000 Chinese citizens visited the country in 2024, with India contributing 146,000.
“Based on current trends, the most potential markets for us are mega markets such as China and India,” said Baisalykov at Air Astana. The company, which already served Beijing, Urumqi, Sanya, and Delhi, has added Guangzhou and Mumbai to its list of destinations this year. Given the demand, the latter will soon become a daily service.
“One of the main reasons for developing these markets is their close location to Kazakhstan (for example, Almaty-Delhi flight time is 3 hours 20 minutes, and Almaty-Urumqi is just 1 hour 45 minutes), as well as the visa-free regime, which greatly supports the growth of tourism traffic to Kazakhstan,” Baisalykov added.
Liberalizing Domestic Markets
Like many post-Soviet countries, Central Asia was long dominated by state-owned airlines, but over the past decade, a gradual wave of privatization and market liberalization has opened the doors to competition.
In Kazakhstan, a 2019 law permitted airlines more freedom to offer a range of prices and baggage options.
“This allowed airlines to unbundle the previously mandatory 20 kg of check-in luggage, meaning tickets no longer had to include it by default,” said Baisalykov.
“The result was lower airfares, while still giving customers the choice to purchase additional services as needed. FlyArystan’s Basic fare includes a randomly assigned seat on the aircraft and one piece of carry-on baggage weighing up to 5 kg.”
FlyArystan, Air Astana’s low-cost subsidiary, has become legendary amongst Kazakh travelers for their persnickety policing of this five kilogram limit, but it has undeniably put downward pressure on prices. Booked a week ahead, passengers can now go from Almaty to Shymkent for as little as $27.
It’s a similar story in Uzbekistan, where new airlines have emerged to challenge the state-owned incumbents. “[Our] launch in 2023 became possible thanks to the liberalization of Uzbekistan’s civil aviation sector in recent years,” Abdulaziz Abdurakhmanov, founder of Centrum Air, a low-cost carrier, told The Diplomat. “Regulatory reforms, including the introduction of open skies policies and reduced barriers for licensing and route access, have created a more favorable environment for private carriers.”
This mirrors the more liberal signals that are coming from Tashkent more generally, as well as the pent-up demand from a growing middle class.
The Rest of Central Asia
The entrance to Ashgabat’s epic international airport. Photo by Joe Luc Barnes.
Elsewhere in Central Asia, things are moving more slowly. Turkmenistan has historically hemmed and hawed over whether it wants to be a world transport hub. The spectacular Ashgabat airport has clearly been designed with this in mind, with enough capacity to host 14 million passengers a year. But such dreams do not dovetail well with the government’s penchant for paranoia and bureaucracy - the country was one of the last in the world to remove COVID-19 restrictions in mid-2023. The recent launch of a single direct flight a week to Incheon, South Korea, is unlikely to move the dial.
Tajikistan too remains similarly hard to access, with flights prohibitively expensive and Dushanbe airport a chaotic place where corruption and petty bribes are normalized. The airport’s director, Ismatullo Abdullozoda was detained on charges of embezzlement this May. Flights predominantly focus on transporting large numbers of migrant workers to Russia, while several major global cities are also served.
Kyrgyzstani airlines’ ambitions to launch direct flights to other countries have been limited by their presence on the European Union’s banned airline list since 2006. It’s a designation that Kyrgyz government officials view as unfair, and which President Sadyr Japarov believes will be overturned soon.
Domestically, these airlines also struggle due to the government’s imposition of a fixed maximum fare for many routes, such as Bishkek-Osh, the price of which has been capped at 4,000 soms ($45) for over a decade.
This helps unite a country that has historically been divided by its mountainous terrain: driving between Bishkek and Osh tends to take around 10 hours, compared as little as 38 minutes by air. However, it also means that airlines have struggled to make a profit and perennially go bust. Those that do operate struggle to attract investment, and are reduced to using ancient planes, cramming as many passengers as possible into the cabin to maximize the payload.
Connecting the Region
While airlines have a role in connecting Central Asia to the world, and stitching together geographically challenging countries, they arguably have a bigger role in bringing together the wider region. As RyanAir and EasyJet have shown in Europe, by fostering people-to-people exchanges, airlines can hugely contribute to realizing a Central Asian identity.
This requires overcoming a lot of bureaucracy, but steps have been taken in this regard. In a summit in November 2024, transport ministers from Central Asia and the Caucasus agreed to establish a regional civil aviation administration. The fact that it did not include Russia was left unmentioned, but its significance was lost on no one. Another huge step was the restoration of flights between Bishkek and Dushanbe in early March. Although Ashgabat remains a little aloof, the other four capitals now all have routes connecting each other.
The next step would be open sky agreements between countries, allowing foreign carriers to compete with entrenched domestic airlines who have seen little competition. Kazakhstan has moved some way to achieving this, with an open sky regime at 15 airports. Uzbekistan plans to do the same, although progress has been slower. Nevertheless, this has facilitated a move away from a spoke system in each country - with flights invariably being routed around large hubs such as Tashkent and Almaty - and has allowed smaller cities to do point-to-point trade with each other.
An example is Centrum’s recent launch of route from Nukus in Uzbekistan to Aktau in Kazakhstan. Spaced just 700 kilometers apart, Centrum’s flight between the two takes a little over an hour, but until that point, a customer would have been forced to fly over two hours east from Nukus to Almaty, before flying back west for three hours to reach Aktau.
In addition to open sky agreements, Centrum Air also spoke of their desire to see fairer regulatory frameworks that give equal access to routes and airport slots for private and state-owned carriers, as well as improving the quality of regional airports to encourage more point-to-point traffic beyond capital cities.
“While the European aviation market benefits from decades of integration, liberalization, and competition, we believe Central Asia is now on a similar trajectory - albeit from a different starting point,” said Centrum’s founder Abdurakhmanov. “The demand is there, the region’s geography is strategic, and the policy winds are favorable. With continued cooperation among governments and private sector stakeholders, a highly competitive, consumer-driven aviation market in Central Asia is not only possible, but well within reach.”
