Turkistan is a pleasant surprise—one hardly expects to see a modern airport which looks like a luxury hotel in a regional center of Kazakhstan. The Hazret Sultan International Airport (HSA) was built from scratch in the bare steppe in 2020, two years after the city became the capital of the Turkistan Region in the south of the country.
The airport now serves about 300,000 passengers per year, including tourists who come to visit local historical sights – the 14th-century mausoleum of the Turkic poet and religious figure Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a medieval fortress, and mosques.
But HSA’s future can change dramatically with the arrival of the new strategic partner – the AlphaSkyAirlines cargo airline, which prepares to take the airport under trust management for the next ten years. The new investor plans to transform the air gateway into a cargo hub using its unique advantages to attract transit airlines, which operate between China and Europe.
