Grabtsevo Airport, Kaluga: description, photo, contact and comments

Kaluga Airport Grabtsevo was opened in 1970. Worked smoothly for 30 years, in 2001 was sent on a long "leave." After the reconstruction, which took only a year, he earned again.

Work history

Grabtsevo International Airport was officially opened on June 1, 1970. The symbolic red ribbon was cut by the first secretary of the Kaluga regional committee of the CPSU AA. Kandrenkovym. The first plane departing from the new airport was the An-24, which took passengers on board and flew to Leningrad.

Class B, which includes the airport Grabtsevo, can take aircraft Tu-134, Yak-40 and An-24, as well as lighter aircraft. For the adoption of helicopters there are no restrictions, they always open the runway.

The first flights on a regular basis were Kaluga-Simferopol on the Yak-40, Kaluga-Sochi, Kaluga-Leningrad on the An-24.

Six years after the opening, June 15, 1976, took the first passenger TU-134 from Sochi, Kaluga (Grabtsevo airport). Flights later became regular.

Directions of flight

After another 15 years, in 1991, the airport operated flights on An-24 aircraft:

• Through Donetsk to Gelendzhik, 4 times a week;
• Through Voronezh in Gelendzhik, 3 times a week;
• In Kaluga from Anapa, through Kharkov, every day;
• From Tambov to Leningrad, through Kaluga, daily;
• From Saransk to Minsk, through Kaluga, 3 times a week.

On Yak-40 aircraft, flights from Belgorod to Leningrad were carried out via Grabtsevo airport. Flights - 2 times a week.

Miscellaneous Events

In 2001, funding was phased out, from which the airport Functioned, and it closed. And a few years later and was completely deleted from the register of civilian airfields in Russia.

In 2008, a message appeared about the Kaluga branch of the Volkswagen plant, which is ready to allocate about half a million rubles for the reconstruction of the airport.

In 2009, in October, Grabtsevo airport was withdrawn from federal ownership and transferred to the regional balance. At the same time, a statement of intention was made to reintroduce it.

Works performed

In 2012, the plan for the general reconstruction of the airport was developed and sent for state expertise.

And on November 1, 2013, the Chinese company OOO Petro-HEKHUA was selected as a general contractor, who was tasked with carrying out reconstruction works. The contract concluded included the repair of the runway, taxiways and parking lot, as well as the installation of a drainage system and a drainage network.

To finance the project, a public-private partnership scheme was used. According to the estimates, the total cost of the work done was 1.71 billion rubles, of which more than half (913 million) were funds allocated from the federal budget. Changes have been made, and now Grabtsevo airport can receive A-319, Boeing-737 and other aircraft, whose landing weight does not exceed 64 tons. The airport's capacity has also increased - about 100,000 people a year.

At the end of 2014, the main reconstruction works came to an end, and on December 18 at 11 am the first Boeing-737 aircraft landed at the renovated airport. It was a flight without passengers.

May 25, 2015, the airport was officially commissioned. At the same time Grabtsevo was again inscribed on the register of civil airfields in Russia.

2015

After the official opening of the airport, a few days later, the sale of air tickets began. Today from Kaluga you can go to St. Petersburg (the plane flies thrice a week) and in Sochi - once a week.

The airport's management, in the person of the general director, spoke in favor of laying routes to Gelendzhik, Simferopol and Mineralnye Vody. As partners, Aeroflot, UTair and Ural Airlines are seen.

On June 16, the Kaluga airport accepted a flight from St. Petersburg with 10 passengers on board. The plane took off on schedule at 8:40 am and after an hour, without delay, landed in Kaluga.

After 4 days, on June 20, the first flight from Kaluga to Sochi was completed, which was also successful.

On July 16, the first flight was sent to the Crimea, and on August 14 the airport was officially given the status of international, with the right to receive and send international flights of Russian and foreign airlines.

In early September, 1 international flight on the route Braunschweig-Kaluga was accepted, at which the German delegation of the board of directors of the company Volkswagen arrived.

The Kaluga-St. Petersburg, Kaluga-Sochi, Kaluga-Mineralnye Vody and Kaluga-Anapa directions are in line, which will be developed through allocated subsidized funds.

At the beginning of January this year, a Russian airline on a modern domestic plane was flown to Nis, Serbia.

Flights from Grabtsevo. Airport: flight schedule

To buy a ticket for a plane departing from Kaluga, you can use three standard ways: through ticket offices, from distributors or independently, via the Internet. Today, thanks to a subsidy allocated from the state budget, the price for the Kaluga-St. Petersburg flight should not exceed the mark of 3000 rubles.

To get from the city center to the airport, you can use bus number 4, which runs on the route "Mira-Grabtsevo Square".

On all questions of interest, you can visit the airport's website or call +74842770007.

Interesting Facts

Journalists in 2015 unconditionally recognized Grabtsevo airport as the best airport of regional importance.

For almost 15 years, while the air harbor was in a canned state, bus No. 4 continued to go to it.

In the coming years, it is planned to open lines to Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan). The estimated time in flight will be no more than 4 hours, and the ticket price will not exceed 12,000 rubles.

Whatever the forecasts for the future, rainbow or not, residents of Kaluga and Kaluga region are infinitely glad that they have their own handsome airport, equipped according to European standards, with attentive and caring staff.

Let's wish the airport further development!