Kazakh budget airline FlyArystan is celebrating the official arrival of two more Airbus A320s. This means the Almaty-based airline will now have nine aircraft in its fleet with an average age of seven years. By adding these additional aircraft, the airline says it will now be able to continue with its expansion plans, connecting more regions and countries.
Two A320s delivered
According to the airline’s Facebook page, two Airbus A320s have recently arrived to join the carrier’s growing fleet. This, the airline states, now brings its total fleet count to nine.
According to data from Planespotters.net, its most recent aircraft are as follows:
- One A320-200 registered as P4-KBN
- One A320neo registered as P4-KBH
Both aircraft are configured to accommodate 180 passengers in a single class, all-economy layout. Indeed, this is the standard configuration for all of its A320 jets.
The two planes aren’t exactly new and fresh from Airbus’ assembly facilities. P4-KBN is actually a former Vistara jet, which was withdrawn from use last September. Prior to FlyArystan’s seat reconfiguration, the jet was set up to have eight business class seats, 24 premium economy seats, and 132 economy class seats. The aircraft is six and a half years old.
P4-KBH, pictured below, came from FlyArystan’s ‘parent’ airline, full-service carrier Air Astana. Thus, it was previously configured with 16 business class seats and 132 in economy. The jet is now four and a half years old.
An expanding fleet for expanding services
According to Breaking Travel News, the airline will use this additional capacity to increase its flights to 65 per day across its domestic network in Kazakhstan, as well as its newly launched international service between the autonomous region of Turkistan and Istanbul.
Since it was announced that FlyArystan would be launching, Simple Flying has been covering the airline’s progress every step of the way- progress that has been quite impressive. Indeed, it appears that this low-cost subsidiary of Air Astana has tapped into an underserved, unsaturated market.
Expansion was swift during the airline’s first year of operations. Even though the airline launched in May 2019, it opened its second base of operations in the major Kazakh city of Karaganda in August just a few months later. Then, just two months later, it announced that it would soon be launching its first international route – a service to Moscow Zhukovsky from Nur-Sultan.
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In its first eight months of operations, the budget carrier boasted carrying a total of 700,000 passengers.
Indeed, as this part of the world continues to develop and connect to other regions, it appears that FlyArystan is poised for success as the region’s only budget airline.
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