AZAL Azerbaijan Airlines adds wet-leased A320 capacity

AZAL Azerbaijan Airlines (J2, Baku Heydar Aliev International) has signed a wet-lease agreement with Lithuania’s GetJet Airlines (GW, Vilnius) for three Airbus A320 aircraft, which it will deploy for the duration of this winter season’s operations.

ch-aviation analysis of Flightradar24 ADS-B data shows that the three GetJet A320-200s are already in or operating out of Baku Heydar Aliev International. Both LY-FAS (msn 4273) and LY-WIZ (msn 3430) were ferried there from Vilnius on October 31, and since then they have conducted flights between the Azeri capital and Antalya, Berlin Brandenburg International, Dubai International, Izmir Adnan Menderes, Istanbul Sabiha Gökcen, Milan Malpensa, Prague Václav Havel, and Vienna.

The third twinjet, LY-GYM (msn 2584), was ferried to Baku on November 2 from Malta International, where it had been stored. GetJet’s Maltese affiliate, Airhub Airlines (RE, Malta International), which operates its own fleet of five aircraft under its local 9H registration, is an occasional ACMI customer of the Lithuanian ACMI/wet-lease specialist.

In a statement, AZAL said it planned to deploy the ACMI jets on the above routes as well as to Almaty and Astana “to meet the growing needs of passengers.” GetJet separately said in its own communiqué that the new contract ensures it keeps busy “a significant number of our Airbus A320 family units for the entire winter season, which usually brings seasonal challenges for ACMI providers.”

GetJet Airlines’ chief executive, Rūta Kulvinskaitė, told ch-aviation in an interview in September that its business “was built from day one to deal with seasonality. So we believe that the fleet and company size is optimal for seasonal changes - winter doesn’t come as a surprise for us as we built the company around that.”

The GetJet fleet currently consists of five A320-200s, one A321-200, and five B737-800s, according to the ch-aviation fleets module. Subsidiary GetJet Airlines Latvia (GJ, Riga) operates an additional A320-200, while Airhub Airlines operates another two A320s, one A330-200, one A330-300, and one A330-900. Customers at the moment include Air Sénégal, Air Serbia, Aruba Airlines, ASL Airlines France, Ibom Air, and Nesma Airlines.