Market notes
On chartering from Moscow
Vnukovo-3 remains the centre of gravity for Russian business aviation. Around 560,000 sq m of apron, capacity for roughly 150 aircraft, and more than 250 aircraft handled or stored make it the largest facility of its kind in the country and one of the largest in Europe by area. The airport as a whole carried 16.1 million passengers in 2024 and is targeting 16.5 million, with foreign carriers making up about 64 percent of the traffic, which is a different picture from the business-jet side of the field.
Business-jet volume has not recovered. Vnukovo's co-owner has described daily movements at Vnukovo-3 falling from 120-130 before February 2022 to 30-40 today, a threefold drop driven by the closure of European airspace to Russian aircraft. The practical consequence for a client is not congestion, it is choice: apron space is easy, but the pool of operators, aircraft types and crews willing and able to serve Moscow is a fraction of what it was, and that is what moves prices.
The route map has rotated south and east. Before 2022 the most-flown destinations from Vnukovo-3 were Dubai, Riga, Nice, London and Larnaca. Today the working corridors are Dubai, Istanbul, Antalya, Baku, Yerevan, Almaty and Tashkent, plus the domestic sectors to St Petersburg and Sochi. Nice, Geneva and London are not served from Moscow by any aircraft that could then return to Europe, so those journeys are done in two legs with an aircraft change at a permitted hub.
We are direct with clients about the regulatory picture because vagueness helps nobody. EASA advises against Russian airspace west of 60 degrees East at all flight levels. Italy prohibits its operators from the Rostov FIR and from Russian airspace within 200 NM of the Ukrainian border, and France advises the same. Rosaviatsiya has cut the Moscow terminal control area ceiling to 4,900 m and banned transit overflights of the region. Southern airports close at short notice. None of that makes a Moscow flight impossible, and Vnukovo-3 handles dozens of business jets a day, but it does mean the operator selection, the insurance terms and the routing all need to be read before the price is.
Ostafyevo is the alternate most people underestimate. Its 2,058 m runway with PCN 24 rules out heavy aircraft at weight, but for a midsize jet arriving from Istanbul or Baku it is a fast, quiet field 30 km south of the centre with international CIQ and Falcon-certified maintenance on site. Sheremetyevo Terminal A, run by A-Group, is the better answer when the destination is north of the city, and Domodedovo's UTG Private Aviation centre is where longer-term hangarage gets arranged.