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Thursday 7 July 2011

Balchik Airport... to be or not to be ?

The Sofia Echo reports today that the Bulgarian cabinet has rushed through the transfer of the old military airport at Balchik to the transport ministry as a first step towards commercial flights.

I say first step, but it may well be the last step because the examples of the airports at Ruse and Gorna, near VT, do not bode at all well. Both concession tenders produced precisely zilch interest.I applaud the supposed desire to open up the North Black sea coast, but an ex military airport will need significant investment and possibly even a longer runway. Varna airport suffers from high airport taxes, but Constanta is close by and under used.

The final point to make is how could an operator actually make any money from this ?.Major operators have already pulled out of Varna, so who exactly is going to fly into Balchik ?.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous5 October 2011 at 12:32

    Hopefully Ryan air or Easy jet or maybe stavros's new aipline.
    I can only live in hope as i have a house in Tsarkva and it's getting so expensive to spend time there now.

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  2. Uncle Bulgaria6 October 2011 at 07:15

    Well Ryanair are flying into Plovdiv and they are not particularly cheap at 160 GBP return.Longer term bookings of course get cheaper.Balchik airport would, I think, have the lower airport taxes to attract these airlines.
    As you say it is expensive to fly into the North East of Bulgaria.

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