Stepanakert airport
The first Yerevan-Stepanakert flight will be experimental and is likely to take place next week, as the head of civil aviation department of NKR government Dmitri Abdashyan told. He said the concrete day of the flight is not announced because of technical matters and weather conditions. The technical flight will check the air navigation, connection system, proficiency of staff, the state of the racetrack etc.
Stepanakert airport
Only after experimental flights, the regular flights can be carried out. But still it is not known which company will carry the flights.
The airport is going to serve 100 passengers per hour. The one-way air ticket to the Armenian capital is likely to cost 16,000 drams.
The airport near the Karabakh capital of Stepanakert has been closed since 1992 when hostilities began in the area. Its reconstruction was launched in 2009 and originally it was expected to go into operation in 2010. But the opening of the airport was delayed several times because the news of imminent flights from and to Karabakh elicited a hostile reaction in Azerbaijan that does not recognize the sovereignty of the authorities in Karabakh. Some officials in Baku went as far as threatening to bring down the civilian planes flying into or out of Karabakh.
The Karabakh military have given assurances that all measures would be taken to ensure the safety of flights. No precise date of when the Karabakh airport is to serve the first flight has been indicated yet.
