New Million-Passenger Airport Appears in Ukraine

Kharkiv airport welcomed its millionth passenger in 2019.

Kharkiv International Airport served more than one million passengers in a single year for the first time in the history of independent Ukraine.

This was reported by the company's press service.

The jubilee passenger on Wednesday, October 2, was 15-year-old Daniel Chervony, who flew in with his parents on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul.

The airline presented the boy with a certificate for free round-trip tickets for three people to any destination. The airport, in turn, granted him free access to the VIP terminal and a certificate for UAH 50,000, which can be spent on anything. A festive reception with cake and champagne was held for the passengers of the flight.

“Ten years ago, in 2009, when only the old terminal was operating at the airport and passenger traffic was under 200,000 people a year, we could barely imagine that we would reach the mark of 1 million passengers, — said Volodymyr Vasylchenko, General Director of the airport's operating company New Systems AM. — That goal seemed very distant to us. But today it has finally been achieved. And this is not the limit.”

Previously, the highest passenger traffic at the airport was recorded in 1990, when the company served about 1.8 million people. Ukrainian airports Boryspil, “Kyiv”, “Lviv”, Odesa and Simferopol also serve more than one million passengers a year.

In early September, Hungarian low-cost airline Wizz Air announced the launch of new flights from Lviv and Kharkiv to Budapest.