Lufthansa to Serve Two Moscow Airports From Frankfurt

German national carrier Lufthansa has announced plans to launch a twice daily connection between Frankfurt and Moscow Vnukovo, complementing its existing flights to Moscow Domodedovo. The confirmation of the new route, which will launch on March 25, 2012 follows just weeks after the carrier revealed it will also serve the Moscow Vnukovo from Berlin as part of its significant expansion at the German capital city to coincide with the opening of the new Willy Brandt Berlin Brandednburg Airport.

The additional service will bring daily links by the German carrier between Frankfurt and Moscow to six, with Aeroflot Russian Airlines also offering four flights per day to Moscow Sheremetyevo; S7 Airlines a daily service to Domodedovo and Transaero Airlines three flights per week to the same airport. An estimated 327,000 O&D passengers travelled between Frankfurt and Moscow in the past year, up 7.4 per cent on the previous 12 month period and Lufthansa has a 30.4 per cent share of this traffic.

Moscow is the largest metropolitan region in Europe with a population of 14 .6 million and Vnukovo is the closest of its three commercial airports to the city centre with fast express train journeys taking just 35 minutes. Up until recently it has predominantly been used as the main gateway into Moscow for domestic and intra-CIS traffic and this will enable Lufthansa to potentially offer onward connections to other destinations with partner carriers. Vnukovo is also well linked to the Kaluga industrial base, a centre of the automotive industry and where a number of foreign companies have established assembly plants.

This growth for summer 2012 will mean Lufthansa will offer more than 153 weekly connections between Germany and Russia, serving nine different destinations: as well as the two Moscow airports these comprise Ekaterinburg, Kazan, Nizhniy Novgorod, Perm, Rostov, Samara, St Petersburg.