Six Airlines Join the Network: Mahan Air, Air Cairo, Rossiya, Aurora, ALROSA and IrAero

Six airlines joined the network today, all of them asked for by members through the contact form. Four are Russian, one Iranian and one Egyptian, and between them they add 1,482 routes, 225 aircraft and 51 airports that were not on the network before.

Mahan Air (IRM / W5) is the first Iranian carrier here. It flies from Tehran Imam Khomeini and Mehrabad with 98 routes, and its fleet is one of the more unusual ones on the network: 39 aircraft covering the Airbus A300, A310, A340-200, A340-300 and A340-600, the BAe 146 and Avro RJ family, and a single Boeing 747-400.

Air Cairo (MSC / SM) is EgyptAir's low cost arm and the second largest addition, with 407 routes from Cairo, Hurghada and Sharm El Sheikh into the European leisure markets and the Gulf. Its 28 aircraft are thirteen A320neos, eleven A320s, three Embraer 190s and an ATR 72-600.

Rossiya Airlines (SDM / FV) is the largest of the six, with 625 routes out of Saint Petersburg Pulkovo, Moscow Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo, and Krasnoyarsk. Its 96 aircraft run from the Superjet 100 up to the Boeing 777-300ER and three Boeing 747-400s.

Aurora (SHU / HZ) covers the Russian Far East from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok with 178 routes on Airbus A319s and Dash 8s. A good part of that network is short lifeline flying to fields on Sakhalin, the Kurils and Kamchatka that nothing else serves.

ALROSA (DRU / 6R) is the airline of the diamond mining company, flying 29 routes from Mirny and Polyarny in Yakutia. Boeing 737-700s and 737-800s work the trunk routes to Novosibirsk and Moscow, and four Antonov An-24s, an An-26 and two An-38s handle the short sectors.

IrAero (IAE / IO) flies 145 routes out of Irkutsk, Chita and Yakutsk. Its fleet is 36 aircraft and is mostly turboprop: fifteen An-24s and fourteen An-26s alongside six Superjet 100s and an A319.

Separately, and also at a member request, Airlink has gained the two Embraer types it was missing. Sixteen ERJ 135s and ten ERJ 140s are now on its books, so the whole 54 aircraft fleet is bookable rather than only the E170, E190 and E195.

Fifty one airports came with these schedules, most of them in Siberia, the Russian Far East and Iran. Among them are Polyarny, Lensk, Tiksi, Iturup, Okha, Taksimo, Yerbogachen, Belaya Gora, Deputatsky, Syktyvkar, Arkhangelsk and Saransk, and on the Iranian side Mehrabad, Abadan, Zahedan, Birjand, Chabahar and Kermanshah.

Two known gaps. Aurora's Petropavlovsk to Severo-Kurilsk rotations are flown by helicopter and are not on the network, and Mahan Air's cabin announcements play in English because there is no Persian voice in the announcement system yet.

If a schedule or a tail looks wrong on any of these, tell us through the contact form and we will fix it.