Central Asia’s most dynamic and successful full-service airline, Air Astana, is set to launch FlyArystan, Kazakhstan’s first low-cost carrier, in the first half of 2019.
The new LCC will operate a fleet of Airbus A320 aircraft – a model particularly popular with LLCs – and will offer all-economy cabins with 180 seats. The new airline will follow a strict LCC model, as used by successful budget carriers like easyjet, Ryanair and Air Asia, and will focus on domestic routes initially, with fares expected to be half that of its full-service sibling.
“FlyArystan is the result of much serious thought and internal business planning and comes as a result of a rapidly changing local and regional airline business environment,” says Air Astana president and CEO Peter Foster. “It will be good for the mid to long-term prospects of Air Astana, and we hope, very welcome to the Kazakhstan travelling public, who will be able to benefit from significantly cheaper airfares on domestic and regional routes”.
The new airline, which will initially operate four aircraft, will expand its fleet to 15 jets by 2022, as it expands its network into the CIS region and beyond. FlyArystan will operate from multiple aircraft bases in Kazakhstan, including the capital Nur-Sultan, with routes and aircraft bases to be announced over the coming months.
FlyArystan’s management team has already been appointed and is drawn from Air Astana’s senior local managers, whom the airline has been developing for the last 16 years. The team will be led by Tim Jordan, a British-Australian national with more than 15 years’ senior LCC management experience at Cebu Pacific and Virgin Blue.
Although FlyArystan, which will be self-funded without state or external financing, will be a low-cost airline, with very different service procedures to those of Air Astana, it will still follow the airline safety standards and reliability that have earned Air Astana multiple awards internationally.
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