The new Saratov airport will open for regular flights on Tuesday, August 20. It will replace the current airport, located near the city center. All flights are expected to be transferred from the old airport on the same day, reports our own correspondent Travel.ru.
The new airport, also called Gagarin or Saburovka, is located approximately 40 kilometers along existing roads north of the center of Saratov. A taxi ride can take about an hour. Little is known about public transportation there yet, except for the proposed launch of express trains from Saratov-1 station, which will take 38 minutes and cost 95 rubles.
The new airport has a 3-kilometer runway (almost a kilometer longer than the old one), which can handle any narrow-body aircraft, as well as wide-body Boeing 767s. This will likely lead to an increase in the number of flights to Saratov, as well as the transfer of many of them to larger aircraft. The old airport only handles relatively small regional aircraft with a capacity of approximately 100 passengers. In addition, a number of new routes are expected to appear, including direct flights to foreign resorts.
The airport terminal currently has three jet bridges, one of which is dedicated to international flights, one to domestic flights, and one in the middle, which can be used for both depending on the situation. In practice, the middle jet bridge will probably be used almost exclusively for domestic flights. In the future, it is possible to add another jet bridge on each side, so in the future there will probably be five of them.
The area of the new building is also several times larger than the old tiny Saratov terminal and is 23 thousand square meters. The terminal of the new airport has 13 check-in counters and a total of 32 passport control booths. Some of them can be allocated to service flights to the EAEU countries that do not require customs control. The declared capacity of the terminal is 410 passengers per hour on domestic routes and 160 on international ones.
The new airport will not take the old airport code RTW. Instead, the code GSV will be used.
Source: travel.ru