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Europe’s low-cost airlines are preparing to re-enter Ukraine as soon as a peace deal is signed that allows its airports to open to travellers again — as they predict a boom from “catastrophe tourism” as well as people returning to the country.
Wizz Air said it planned to have 15 aircraft based in the country within two years of a peace agreement, which will rise to 50 in seven years, while Ryanair said it could relaunch services within two weeks of any deal.
“We have planned for this, as soon as the airspace opens we are going to be very quick to re-establish ourselves,” Wizz Air CEO József Váradi told the Financial Times. “Re-opening would be a significant opportunity for us”.
As well as a wave of returning Ukrainians and significant reconstruction work, Varadi predicted a wave of “catastrophe tourism” in the country, where travellers visit human-made or natural disaster-hit areas. “When the Berlin Wall came down, millions of people went there to see it,” he said.
Wizz, headquartered in Hungary, was the largest non-Ukrainian airline operating in the country before Moscow’s 2022 invasion forced international airlines to cease operations. Handling more than 5,000 flights to Ukraine in 2021, the group was the third-largest carrier after Russia’s Aeroflot and Windrose, a Ukrainian charter group, that year.
Close to 15mn passengers flew to Ukraine during 2019, the high-water mark of air travel before the pandemic. Some 10.8mn people flew in 2021, the year before Russia’s invasion, according to data from aviation consultancy Cirium.
Ryanair executives have visited key Ukrainian airports with a plan to raise its traveller numbers to 4mn. Before Ukrainian airports closed, the airline carried around 1.5mn people a year to Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa.
“We would have flights on sale within two weeks, it’s only a question of when it’s safe to fly,” chief executive Eddie Wilson said in an interview this week.
He said the airline, which has aircraft based in 95 airports across Europe, could open routes from any of its bases without disrupting the rest of its network, allowing the carrier to move faster than rivals with fewer bases.
“You can fly from Dublin, Shannon, Cork, across the UK or Europe, you could have three, four, five flights a week. You can turn the dial in Ukraine easily,” he said. “There wouldn’t be any difficulty whatsoever filling 4mn passengers over there.”
EasyJet, which previously did not fly to Ukraine, is also exploring opening routes there. Chief executive Kenton Jarvis said the country promised to be “Europe’s largest construction project”, while people “will want to come home when home is safe”.
“It’s a missing part of Europe right now,” he said.
“Operationally, the air traffic control can be started quite quickly, it comes down to the condition of the airports and runways, and to making sure the terminal and runways are operating to the highest safety standards.”
Unlike Wizz and Ryanair, it does not plan to have aircraft based in Ukraine in the short term.
The EU’s Aviation Safety Authority currently advises airlines not to travel over Ukrainian airspace, or to land in the country.
“Airspace and critical infrastructure, including airports, are exposed to military activities which result in safety risks for civil aircraft. In particular, there is a risk of both intentional targeting and misidentification of civil aircraft,” it warns.
In 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down when flying over eastern Ukraine.
Data from Cirium shows only one airline — Russian low-cost carrier Smartavia — registering flights into the country in the past two years.