The coronavirus pandemic has severely impacted operations at Gyumri’s Shirak airport, Armenia’s second international air gate after Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport.

Suffice it to say that after the declaration of a state of emergency in Armenia on March 16, no passengers used Shirak between April and June.

And they couldn’t because there was only one flight there during those three months. Data published by Armenia’s Civil Aviation Committee shows this to be the case.

The graph below shows that the number of passengers between January and February of this year was in line with the same period of the last three years, but in March, the number of passengers decreased sharply, and in April-June the airport was virtually idle.

For comparison, in the first half of this year Shirak served 27,533 passengers.  During the same period last year, that number was 2.5 times more - 68,175 people.

No cargo transportation has taken place in Shirak for the past six months. No matter how bad it sounds, this is a common phenomenon in the case of the Gyumri airport, through which cargo and mail were not delivered and imported during the whole of 2019.

Last year, the Armenian government decided to establish a free economic zone (FEZ) in Gyumri. The FEZ will be operational in terms of logistics and production. Shirak Airport has an important role to play here, through which large-scale cargo transportation is planned. To date, this is the only prospect that cargo transportation will intensify at the air gates of Gyumri.

As stated, there was only one flight in Shirak in April-June (judging by the statistics, no passengers were transported). In January-February of this year, there were more flights and landings at the airport than in the previous two years, but since March, the pandemic and the declared state of emergency have had a negative impact, reducing the number of flights to zero.

Between January and June of this year, ninety take-offs and landings were made in Shirak. There were 200 in the same period in 2019.

The "misfortune" of Shirak, in terms of flights, is that it depends on one operator, the Russian company Pobeda, which stopped the Moscow-Gyumri-Moscow flights in March.

Although it was previously announced that the Irish lowcoster Ryanair would also operate flights from Gyumri to Europe, it is clear that the coronavirus has already upended the flight plans of almost all airlines.