Kaluga Grabtsevo Airport was opened in 1970. He worked uninterruptedly for 30 years, in 2001 he was sent on a long "vacation". After the reconstruction, which took only a year, he earned again.
Work history
Grabtsevo International Airport was officially opened on June 1, 1970. The symbolic red ribbon was cut by the first secretary of the Kaluga regional committee of the CPSU A.A. Kandrenkov. The first plane to fly from the new airport was the An-24, which received passengers who had boarded its board and went on a flight to Leningrad.
Class B, which includes the Grabtsevo airport, can receive Tu-134, Yak-40 and An-24 aircraft, as well as lighter aircraft. There are no restrictions for the acceptance of helicopters; they always have a landing strip open to them.
The very first flights taking place on a regular basis were Kaluga-Simferopol to Yak-40, Kaluga-Sochi, Kaluga-Leningrad to An-24.
6 years after the opening, on June 15, 1976, he received the first passenger Tu-134 from Sochi, Kaluga (Grabtsevo Airport). Flights later became regular.
Flight directions
After another 15 years, in 1991, flights from the airport were operated by An-24 aircraft:
- through Donetsk to Gelendzhik, 4 times a week;
- through Voronezh to Gelendzhik, 3 times a week;
- to Kaluga from Anapa, through Kharkov, every day;
- from Tambov to Leningrad, through Kaluga, daily;
- from Saransk to Minsk, through Kaluga, 3 times a week.
Yak-40 aircraft operated flights from Belgorod to Leningrad via Grabtsevo Airport. Flights - 2 times a week.
Miscellaneous events
In 2001, funding was discontinued, due to which the airport functioned and it closed. And a few years later he was completely deleted from the register of civilian airfields in Russia.
In 2008, a message appeared about the Kaluga branch of the Volkswagen plant, which is ready to allocate about half a million rubles for the reconstruction of the airport.
In October 2009, in October, the Grabtsevo airport was removed from federal ownership and transferred to the regional balance. At the same time, a statement of intent appeared to put it back into operation.
Work performed
In 2012, a plan for the general reconstruction of the airport was developed and sent for state examination.
And on November 1, 2013, the Chinese company Petro-Hekhua LLC was selected as the general contractor, who was entrusted with the task of carrying out reconstruction work. The concluded contract included the repair of the runway, taxiways and aircraft parking lots, as well as the installation of a drain and a drainage network.
To finance the project, a public-private partnership scheme was used. According to estimates, the total cost of the work performed was 1.71 billion rubles, of which more than half (913 million) were funds allocated from the federal budget. Changes have been made, and now the Grabtsevo airport can take A-319, Boeing 737 and other aircraft whose landing weight does not exceed 64 tons. The airport capacity has also increased - about 100,000 people a year.
By the end of 2014, the main reconstruction work came to an end, and on December 18, at 11 a.m., the first Boeing 737 aircraft landed at the renovated airport. It was a flight without passengers.
On May 25, 2015, the airport was officially commissioned. At the same time, Grabtsevo was again inscribed in the register of civil airfields in Russia.
2015 year
After the official opening of the airport, a few days later, the sale of airline tickets began. Today from Kaluga you can go to St. Petersburg (the plane flies three times a week) and in Sochi - 1 time per week.
The airport management in the person of the Director General spoke in favor of laying routes to Gelendzhik, Simferopol and Mineralnye Vody. The partners are Aeroflot, UTair and Ural Airlines.
On June 16, the Kaluga airport accepted a flight from St. Petersburg with 10 passengers on board. The plane took off on schedule at 8:40 a.m. and an hour later, without delay, landed in Kaluga.
After 4 days, on June 20, the first flight from Kaluga to Sochi was completed, which was also successful.
On July 16, the first flight was sent to Crimea, and on August 14, the airport was officially assigned international status, with the right to receive and send international flights of Russian and foreign airlines.
At the beginning of September, one international flight on the route Braunschweig-Kaluga was accepted, on which the German delegation of the Volkswagen Board of Directors arrived.
Directions Kaluga-Saint Petersburg, Kaluga-Sochi, Kaluga-Mineralnye Vody and Kaluga-Anapa fell into line, which will develop at the expense of allocated subsidized funds.
At the beginning of January of this year, a Russian airline made a flight to Nis, Serbia on a modern domestic plane.
Flights from Grabtsevo. Airport Flight Schedules
To buy a ticket for a plane departing from Kaluga, you can use three standard methods: through ticket offices, from distributors, or independently, via the Internet. Today, thanks to a subsidy allocated from the state budget, the price of a Kaluga-Saint Petersburg flight should not exceed the mark of 3,000 rubles.
To get from the city center to the airport, use bus number 4, plying the route "Square of the World-Grabtsevo."
For all questions of interest, you can visit the airport website or call +74842770007.
Interesting Facts
In 2015, reporters unconditionally recognized Grabtsevo Airport as the best airport of regional significance.
For almost 15 years, while the air harbor was in a mothballed state, bus No. 4 continued to walk to it.
In the coming years, it is planned to open lines to Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan). Estimated time in flight will be no more than 4 hours, and the ticket price will not exceed 12,000 rubles.
Whatever the forecasts for the future, rosy or not, the residents of Kaluga and the Kaluga region are infinitely glad that they have their own handsome airport equipped according to European standards, with attentive and caring staff.
We wish the airport further development!