Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) carried 3,661,630 passengers between January and October this year, up 6% from the same period last year. Commercial director Jamil Manizade said transit passengers travelling through Baku accounted for roughly 90% of the additional traffic.
According to figures released by Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL), total passenger numbers over the 10-month period rose by 193,219 compared with the previous year. The number of flights operated during the same period climbed 8% to 31,481, some 2,204 more flights than in the corresponding period of 2025.
Transit passenger numbers grew 23%, up 172,925 to reach 924,078. As a result, the share of transfer passengers in total traffic rose from 22% to 25%, meaning one in every four AZAL passengers currently transits through Baku.
Jamil Manizade said that in the first ten months of the year, more than 3,000 passengers on average travelled through transit flights at the capital’s airport each day, about 570 more than the same period a year earlier.
Regional routes see sharp growth
Transit passenger numbers on several regional routes through Baku airport have multiplied several times over. The Delhi-Tbilisi route recorded 12,851 passengers, an 18.6-fold increase, while the Chisinau-Delhi route saw 6,408 passengers, up 9.6 times. Passenger numbers on the Almaty-Jeddah route reached 7,792, up 341%, and the Delhi-Tel Aviv route climbed to 9,773 passengers, up 176%.
Growth continued across five key routes in October: the Delhi-Tbilisi route carried 1,404 passengers (up 527%), Astana-Tbilisi carried 1,270 passengers (up 290%), Delhi-Tel Aviv carried 1,757 passengers (up 104%), Chisinau-Delhi carried 1,015 passengers (up 915%), and the newly launched Jeddah-Shymkent route carried 1,122 passengers. Combined transit traffic on these five routes reached 6,568 passengers in October, more than four times the 1,510 recorded in the same month last year.
The airline also raised the average daily flight time across its entire fleet from 8.9 block-hours to 9.8 block-hours during the January-October period. Excluding leased aircraft operated with their own crews, the figure for Airbus-type aircraft rose from 9.3 hours to 11 hours.
