Izvestia: "Sheremetyevo, Vnukovo to form hub"
The Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo airports will become an integral whole – for now only on paper – as the federal government purchases a large chunk of the Moscow city government's shares in Vnukovo. The airports will later be connected via express trains.
The airports' future was discussed at a conference on developing the Moscow air hub linking Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Vnukovo. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin chaired the event.
The federal government owns 100% of Sheremetyevo. It now plans to buy 75% of the shares in Vnukovo from the Moscow city government. The Moscow budget will receive from 45 to 50 billion roubles, which will be spent on developing the metro system. In the prime minister's opinion, concentrating property in the federal centre will create a synergistic effect and increase passenger and cargo traffic.
"The government isn't going to keep these assets forever," Putin said. "We need to establish an integral complex, provide it with technical facilities, put it on the market at the right price, and eventually privatise it."
According to experts, the Moscow hub will carry up to 86 million people per year by 2020, whereas the current infrastructure can only handle 65 million passengers, or no more than 600,000 take-offs and landings.
"We plan to double the three airports' capacity to reach 100 million passengers per year by 2020," the prime minister said.
To reach this goal, the Finance, Economic Development and Transport ministries were instructed to fund and organise a new runway's construction in Sheremetyevo over the next few years and to finish rebuilding the runway at Vnukovo in 2012.
The skies over Moscow, or the traffic control system, also provide Russia with enormous potential. More than 40 new routes have been introduced in the Moscow air zone since 2005. The traffic control centre requires more modern navigation equipment to help flight operation officers deal with the ant-heap from the ground.
Passengers are more interested in the ground leg of their air travel.
"Sometimes it takes longer to get to the airport than to make a flight," Putin said, asking the relevant agencies to propose solutions for better connections between transportation modes.
Today, this is an urgent issue as Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo will be an integral whole and the journey between the airports is a huge problem. That's why the share of transit passengers at Moscow airports is smaller than at European hubs. Trains could help resolve the problem. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 30 billion roubles should be spent on developing the train connections between the airports.
Airport modernisation in St Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok is next on the agenda.
After the meeting, Putin decided to check out the railway transportation's benefits and took an Aeroexpress train to Moscow. The journey was quick and free of traffic jams.
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The federal government owns the Sheremetyevo airport. Now it will buy 75% of the shares in Vnukovo from the Moscow city government for 45-50 billion roubles.
Yulia Shestopyorova
