The Government of Armenia is planning to launch a new state-owned airline to decrease the country's dependency on foreign-flagged airlines, Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Suren Papikyan said during a parliamentary hearing.
"We have a task to create a local carrier in the near future. In the near future, I will do everything possible for us to have our own airline," Panorama.am quoted Papikyan as saying.
He said that while the current government has embarked upon a plan to reform and modernise the Armenian airline market, it had to take responsibility for the "mistakes of its predecessors". The European Commission has blacklisted all Armenian-flagged airlines for the country's non-compliance with international safety standards and a lack of adequate oversight capabilities.
"The problems we're facing today have not emerged overnight and are not the result of the 2019 activity at all. However, it would be desirable to have avoided these problems," Papikyan said.
Armenia has not had a state-owned flag carrier since the collapse of Armenian Airlines (1991) (Yerevan) in 2003. Its role was subsequently assumed by privately-owned Armavia (Yerevan), which itself went out of business in 2013.
According to the ch-aviation PRO airlines module, active Armenian scheduled carriers include Armenia Aircompany (a subsidiary of Georgian Airways), Armenia Airways, and sister airlines Atlantis European Airways and Atlantis Armenian Airlines.
The ch-aviation capacities module shows that in the Summer 2020 season, the largest airline serving Yerevan will be Aeroflot (SU, Moscow Sheremetyevo) with a 15.9% market share by capacity in the week starting on October 5, 2020.
