Air Astana is Doing Something Right.

             by David Parmer / Tokyo

It is seldom that a person or organization gets positive reviews across the board, but that is the case for Kazakhstan’s national carrier, Air Astana. Customers and aviation writers give the airline top marks for both equipment and customer service. Air Astana is a relatively young airline, having first gotten off the ground in 2002. In the past 17 years it has moved from success to success, posting a US$5.3million profit in 2018 and being consistently profitable along the way.

Reviewers note friendly staff, clean aircraft and good service as reasons for customer satisfaction. A factor they also consider is its relatively young fleet: the average age is 7.1 years. (Legacy carriers, on the other hand, can have fleets with an average age of up to double this figure). Moreover, the fleet is constantly being upgraded.

Air Astana is flying mostly the Airbus A320, and has taken delivery of its first A321LR narrow body aircraft. The A321LR will replace its aging Boeing 757s and enable long-haul flights to destinations such as Tokyo, Singapore and Shanghai. In 2020 Air Astana will use the A321LR for its Astana-London route.

Air Astana’s latest success has been the launch of Kazakhstan’s first LCC: Fly Arystan. Launched in 2019, the LCC has already flown nearly half a million passengers. The airline is looking to have a fleet of 15 aircraft by 2022. The business model for Fly Arystan is low fares plus a high quality product.

The only cloud on the horizon for Kazakhstan’s booming airline industry’s seems to be a lack of infrastructure that can keep pace with its ongoing success. New airports and new infrastructure will have to catch up to the demands of a regional national carrier moving onto the world stage.

If you haven’t seen any aircraft with the distinctive Air Astana or Fly Arystan logos yet, there is a good chance that you will, for these two airlines are going places–literally.

photo: Air Astana Airbus, Christian Junker via flickr

Compiled from Web sources.

Person of Interest: Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, President of Kazakhstan.

           by David Parmer / Tokyo

Plus ca Change, Plus C’est La Meme Chose

In the case of the leadership of Kazakhstan, the French might be right: the more things change, the more they remain the same. On March 20, 2019, Kazakhstan’s first post-Soviet president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stepped down after 29 years in office. Mr. Nazarbayev was replaced by career diplomat and government minister Kassym-Jomart Tokayev from his own Nur Otan party.

In June 2019 Mr. Tokayev was duly elected president (not without some protest in the country) with 71% of the popular vote. Mr. Tokayev has a solid resume of important positions giving him the experience and broad view to assume the presidency. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International relations in 1975 and began working for the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He then had postings to Singapore and Beijing where he attended the Beijing Language Institute.

From 2002-2007 Mr. Tokayev served as Prime Minister of Kazakhstan. In 2011 he went to Geneva to work as Director General of the United Nations. In 2013 he became Chairman of the Senate of Kazakhstan. 2019 saw him start his term as president.

One of the legacies of President Nursultan Nazarbayev is the Astana International Financial Center (AFIC). AFIC was launched in 2018 and is designed to be a regional finance hub. It has relationships with the US NASDAQ and the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Kazakhstan is a key to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and has been described as by Forbes Magazine as “the most stable economy in the ‘stans’.” (Central Asia). Kazakhstan’s economy can also be compared to that of China in the1980s in that it has several state-run enterprises that must be sold off and made private.

While Mr. Nazarbayev is no longer president, he has not gone away. As Kazakhstan’s first president he is accorded elder statesman status for life. The Nazarbayev-Tokayev dynamic is similar to the current situation in Cuba where an elder statesman, Raul Castro, shadows a younger president, Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Kazakhstan has had a relatively smooth transition of power, and it looks like the work of the country’s first president will continue and his legacy remain intact. Everyone might not agree, but at least in this case, the sameness of change might just be a good thing for the country, the people of Kazakhstan, and the region.

Photo: UN Geneva via flickr