Largest passenger plane in Ukraine evacuated from Boryspil airport

The plane of Skyline Express, formerly Azur Air Ukraine, took off from Boryspil airport on the morning of December 19 and landed in Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrénées airport in France a few hours later, according to open data from the online radar flightradar24.

This airfield is used as a base for maintenance and long-term storage of aircraft.

The Boeing 777-300ER airliner arrived in Ukraine at the end of 2021. Before that, it was operated by the Russian airline Azur Air. The aircraft has a record capacity for Ukrainian aviation - it could carry 531 passengers.

Before the full-scale war in Ukraine began, the aircraft under the call sign Azur Air Ukraine transported tourists of the Anex Tour tour operator to resort destinations in the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

At the time of the Russian illegal invasion, this Boeing 777-300ER, registration VQ-BZD, was at Boryspil International Airport in Kyiv. Due to the closure of the airspace for civil aviation, the plane could not take off.

During the war, three planes were evacuated from Boryspil Airport.

In particular, on December 20, 2022, Turkey evacuated two Airbus A400 military transport aircraft. They arrived at Boryspil on the night of February 23-24, 2022, and could not leave the country due to the closed skies.

On April 4, 2023, Ukrainian airline SkyUp managed to fly its Boeing 737-800 aircraft with UR-SQP registration from Boryspil Airport to Romania. At the time of the invasion, it was the only aircraft of the airline that remained in Ukraine.

As a reminder, a plane took off from Boryspil Airport. The evacuation video was shared at the capital's airport.

We also reported that a third civilian plane was evacuated from Lviv. The flight to Warsaw took place on June 1.