Within weeks, more new destinations are expected to be announced: Tamás Meleghegyi, Managing Director of Airport Debrecen Kft. held a press conference on new regular flights to be launched from Debrecen. The airport of Debrecen aims to reach 600,000 passengers annually in three or four years. With the introduction of Debrecen-London Wizz Air flight on 18 June, the yearly traffic is expected to grow to 80,000 (from the present 30,000).According to the Director, the total capacity would be 35 flights a day. In order to ensure the continuous and smooth plane traffic, the company is planning to perform a half a billion HUF worth infrastructural improvements, including the renovation of the information technology system and installing special tools that allow traffic in winter.
As Tamás Meleghegyi told, Debrecen is the best situated city of the region: its geographical features (topography, amount of precipitation) make more flyable hours possible than the surrounding airports in Romania. The airport of Debrecen can serve a given type of flight 25-30 percent cheaper than other airports.
As far as transport of passengers is concerned, he said they are negotiating with two big national and some smaller low-cost airlines. All the new destinations (which are to be announced in few weeks’ time) will be European cities. The greatest interest is for German and South European, mainly Italian and Spanish destinations.
About possible Asian destinations the Director told that mostly China, India and some Arabic countries are the most interested. These interests are about both passenger carriage and freight transport.
He considers no chance to have regular flights between Asia and Debrecen this year, because the planes of the concerned airlines should be submitted to longer preparatory works before coming towards new destinations.
In response to a question on the cargo traffic, Tamás Meleghegyi highlighted that the Xanga group (which is the operator of the airport and the industrial park besides it) has already started the construction of a cargo base.
(MTI information)
