OREANDA-NEWS. July 06, 2012. Head of Karelia Alexander Khudilainen has held a meeting devoted to development of air transportation in the republic. Plans and prospects of air passenger transportations were discussed at the meeting.

Alexander Efimov, acting Deputy Head of the Republic of Karelia and acting Minister of Economic Development of the Republic of Karelia, has told that at the moment in the republic there are two air carriers: budgetary institution of Petrozavodsk Airport and state institution of Northwest Base of Aerial Protection of Forests.

Ministry of Economic Development of Karelia together with the Federal Air Transport Agency works on revival and development of the aircraft service, including both local, and inter-regional flights. Currently, there are five flights a week from Petrozavodsk to Moscow, and three flights a week to Kostomuksha and on the route St.-Petersburg – Petrozavodsk – Helsinki – Petrozavodsk – St.-Petersburg. Flights are performed by carrier RusLine, Murmansk aviation enterprise and AviaManagementGroup and are subsidized from the republican budget. However, loading of flights grows constantly, for example, flights to Kostomuksha have appeared to be in great demand, that in the long term might make these flights self-supporting. Today it is necessary to provide good connections between flights to make it convenient to the people living up North to travel to capital cities by plane. The next stage may become development of internal flights to Pudozh and to other towns and settlements.

The Government of Karelia works on involvement of funds of the federal budget for modernization of the Karelia's main airport Petrozavodsk. By 2015 within the Civil Aviation sub-program of the Development of the Transport System of Russia federal target program the republic will be assigned 784 million roubles. These means will make it possible to reconstruct engineering structures of the airport, to update its technical condition, to meet the requirements of aviation safety, to increase throughput. The budget of the republic is expected to co-finance the project with 109 million roubles.

It is extremely necessary to modernize Petrozavodsk airport and runways in regions of the republic, as well as to update the park of planes and helicopters of Northwest Base of Aerial Protection of Forests. For many years neither the state, nor business invested in Karelian aviation, therefore there was an accumulation of problems in this sphere. Director General of Petrozavodsk airport Alexander Vasin, chief of Northwest Base of Aerial Protection of Forests Vadim Bazykin and his assistant Yuri Savchuk spoke about it at the meeting.

Alexander Khudilainen has also declared importance of aviatransportations for such a large region as Karelia: "It is a necessary thing to support the high status of the Republic of Karelia in the opinion of our population and in the opinion of investors and guests."

By order of the Head of Karelia at the first stage the working group of experts will be established to develop the sequence of perspective activities in the sphere of the avia transportation complex. Alexander Khudilainen also spoke of the necessity to provide more strict coordination of this work and of creation of a division in the long term that would competently pursue a policy of rendering transport services to the population and would form an efficient system of passenger traffic in Karelia.