While not necessarily a historic moment, the resumption of direct flights between Yerevan and Turkey are a welcome development, especially following the 2020 Karabakh war. Though not new for both countries, this reconnection is largely been seen as part of post-war attempts to unblock regional economic and transport links as part of the 2020 November ceasefire agreement and a resulting renewed attempt to normalise Armenia-Turkey relations.
In the same vein, the authorisation by the Armenian Civil Aviation Authority for AZAL to use its airspace to connect Azerbaijan with its exclave of Nakhichevan in October last year also marks the first signs of progress occurring in that process too.
According to the online departure board at Yerevan’s Zvartnots Airport, the FlyOne flight to Istanbul will depart at 6pm later today. The Pegasus flight to Yerevan will depart Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen Airport at 11.35 pm. Both will operate three reciprocal flights a week. The Armenian Armavia and Turkish Atlasjet airlines both flew the route from the late 2000s, but the last such flight was in late 2019.
Although not launched yet, the Turkish government has also said that it also wants to see additional charter flights on the Kars-Yerevan route, potentially turning it into a tourism destination for Armenians.
Istanbul’s ethnic Armenian community will certainly benefit from the resumption of direct flights, but so too will other citizens of both countries looking for new business opportunities. In the late 2000s, the Yerevan-Istanbul flight carried many Armenian citizens who had traveled to Turkey to purchase goods that they would return with to resell in Armenia.
Also of significance is that such flights will now enable Armenian and Turkish civil society actors to meet more easily, regularly, and at less cost than in the past two years, though the pandemic and the 2020 war likely put that on hold anyway. The last time I flew the route, for example, was to present at a cross-border multimedia project in Istanbul in the early 2010s.
Moreover, for Armenia at least, regaining access to a regional hub such as Istanbul for transit to other destinations is a major benefit, especially as international air travel slowly returns to pre-2020 pandemic levels. Nonetheless, a real indicator of whether full normalisation has occurred will be when Turkish Airlines flies to and from Yerevan.
Having covered the Armenia-Turkey Protocol process extensive from late 2008 to 2012, there’s more to write in more detail, but for now I’ll leave that for a longer and more extensive post in the very near future. For now, though, it’s a small but relevant glimmer of hope. If in the late 2000s such flights weren’t publicised well, there is likely to be a lot of coverage today.
