Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, will launch non-stop flights on Thursday 7 May to Astana in Kazakhstan from its Abu Dhabi home base.
The Kazakhstan capital will be served, once a week from Abu Dhabi with the airline, using an Airbus A319 aircraft.
Astana will become the second destination in Kazakhstan served by Etihad and the Abu Dhabi-based airline’s 52nd across its expanding global flight network. The announcement follows the launch by Etihad in December 2008 of flights to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city.
To facilitate the launch, Etihad’s current four times a week service to Almaty will be reduced to three times a week.
Flight EY294 will depart Abu Dhabi every Thursday at 10.05am and arrive in Astana at 4.35pm the same day. Return flight EY295 will depart Astana on the same day at 5.35pm, arriving in Abu Dhabi at 8.25pm.
James Hogan, Etihad Airways’ chief executive, said: “Since the launch of our Almaty service in December 2008, commercial ties between the UAE and Kazakhstan have been significantly strengthened with several major investment projects being announced in recent months. It is against this positive backdrop that we launch our second destination in Kazakhstan, to the country’s capital Astana.”
The timing of the new service will offer air travellers convenient onward connections, via Abu Dhabi, onto a significant number of other key destinations across Etihad’s global network, particularly across the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.
Since gaining independence in October 1990, Kazakhstan has benefited from major foreign investment, particularly in the oil and gas sector which has brought rapid economic growth to the country.
Kazakhstan is already among the world’s top 20 oil producers and expects to be one the world’s top oil exporters in the next decade or two, as foreign investment in new pipelines continues.
Kazakhstan is expected to pump more than 3.5 million barrels of oil a day in the coming decade. It also has ambitions to pump up to 45 billion cubic metres of natural gas a year by 2015.
Etihad will operate a two-class Airbus A319 configured to carry 110 passengers with 20 seats in business class and 90 in economy class.
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