Valery Grigoryev, Bolshoe Savino (Perm Airport) - Аэропорт "Большое Савино" (Пермь)
Release Date: 2010-03-01
Valery Grigoryev, General Director of Bolshoe Savino airport in Perm, has been interviewed by Russianavia.net to discuss the current priorities of the airport's development and the main concerns and ambitions of the regional airports in Russia.Till very recently Bolshoe Savino airport and Perm Airlines were part of the same enterprise. How did the split-off of the airport influence its further development?
It was typical for the Soviet aviation enterprises to include an airport, a fuel station, a hotel, an airline, a cargo facility and a fleet of aircraft. After the collapse of the USSR, when the market was taking shape, it introduced some drastic changes. As a result, the hotel, the fuel station and the cargo facility were taken out of the structure. Moreover, according to the Russian laws, the airline loses its license if it does not operate the aircraft for more than 6 months, so we had to make the aircrew redundant on June 1, 2009.
The best solution would have been to split the airport and the airline as it is done in the rest of the world. There are cases of companies who have chosen this mode of development. This is a dead end because it creates a conflict between the interests of the airport and the airline: the main share of the profit normally goes to the carrier who does not want to encourage competition while the airport is interested in new carriers. As a result, the airline stagnates because it finds it difficult to compete with old aircraft and a weak route network. This has happened with Perm Airlines back in 2005 when S7 came to Bolshoe Savino operating Airbuses and Boeings which made it almost impossible to compete with it.
Does the airport plan to issue shares?
According to the state policy, a state enterprise is very limited in its activities and is very inflexible. As the General Director, I’m tied down by the federal laws and the policy of Rosaviatsia (the state Russian authority for aviation - Transl. Notes). Moreover, we’re listed as a strategic enterprise. As a solution, the property of the airport – taxiways and the runway – will be transferred to the state unitary enterprise Administration of Civil Airports. After that, according to a state decree, we’ll be delisted from strategic enterprises and included in the state privatization plan to become a 100% state-owned joint stock company. This is the best organization form for the airport because the owner of the shares will invest a lot of assets in developing the enterprise and its policy. Any private investor is interested in making his assets profitable.
Some of the potential private investors are Novaport, Koltsovo-Invest…
They have not yet made any clear offers. As far as I know, the regional administration is interested in taking this property.
Strategically, Bolshoe Savino is located close to other airports. What are its competitive advantages?
Its main competitive advantage is its location. As a transport hub, the airport is located closely to central Russia on the western border of the Urals. Moreover, Perm is a multi-million-strong city with over 3 millions more living in the region. It’s a crossroads of the east-west and north-south transport routes with a railroad, a highway and river Kama, a big port near Volga that is connected to the sea.
As we know, the airport services the passengers who are the clients of the airlines. One of the main tasks of the airport is to entice airlines and offer them good services and infrastructure. Particularly, Bolshoe Savino accepts all types of aircraft operated in Russia and abroad except А 380. As for the precise figures, the length of the runway is 3.2 km and the maximum capacity of the airport is 1.5 mln passengers per year. For further development, it is necessary to reconstruct the terminals, the parking lots and modernize the equipment.
One of the most important issues is the passenger flow. In the post-Soviet period it reached its peak in 1991 with 1.5 mln people, falling till 2000-2001 to reach the bottom (170,000 people, almost a 10-fold fall). The trend was reversed in 2002 with intensive growth. During the four pre-crisis years (2005-2008), the growth was reaching an incredible 25% of every previous year. The passenger flow showed 686,000 people in 2008 and 572,000 people in 2009.
What are the current priorities in developing the airport?
It is not enough to develop the infrastructure. The priority for the airport is a basic airline which forms the route network. The basic airline assumes a lot of risks, firstly the passenger flow. Airlines are forced to pay for airport services and have to plan the routes upfront.
All aircraft landing in Perm airport use short-term parking stands and the route network does not develop which generates financial losses for the airport. Besides, the basic airline needs adequate technical conditions. They were created back in the Soviet times but the costs of training the staff to service new foreign aircraft are very high, and I would plan it only in the long term. It is obvious that an airline requires it but the equipment is too expensive to take such risks at this moment. Our main objective now is to develop regional flights but, again, this requires a basic airline that would undertake this mission. Regional flights will ensure international routes in the longer term.
Currently, the main destinations are Moscow and St-Petersburg. 60% of flights from Perm arrive in Moscow while 20 years ago you could directly reach 120 cities of the USSR from here. There are also seasonal summer flights to the south of Russia. We had made unsuccessful attempts to introduce flights to Samara, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. As for the regular international flights, there is a flight to Frankfurt am Main with Lufthansa and a regular charter to Antalya (Turkey), Sharm El Sheikh, Hurghada (Egypt) and Goa (India).
The neighbor regions, namely the Republic of Bashkiria, have already adopted the program of supporting regional aviation. The President of Bashkiria is supporting it however the Russian authorities generally prefer to relaunch the regional transport at the expense of the regions. We’re hoping for cooperation with the regional administration in this issue.
The second priority is to develop general aviation. In the Soviet times, local airlines were operating here for agriculture, oil and gas industry and medicine.
General aviation, as well as the related services – maintenance and security of private jets – has so far been poorly developed in Russia because this is overlooked by the airport authorities who would rather let the owner solve these problems on his own.
Your final message to the international audience of www.russianavia.net?
As I have said, our main task is to attract as many carriers as possible and increase cargo transport. Bolshoe Savino is a comfortable airport to fly from the Far East where a lot of the transport flow is generated. At the moment, the only way to fly to the Far East and Novosibirsk from Perm is through Moscow which is extremely unreasonable. We’re also interested in developing tourism and creating attractive conditions for tour operators. A lot of tourists use the airports of Yekaterinburg and Moscow to fly to exotic destinations from but they would be much happier to fly from Perm. So, we’re committed to develop the route network and, as soon as the crisis is over - to reconstruct the terminals and increase the passenger flow.
| Company: | Bolshoe Savino (Perm Airport) - Аэропорт "Большое Савино" (Пермь) |
| Position: | General Director |
| Country: | Russian Federation |