Feras, the Russia-based corporate aircraft service company co-directed and managed by Americans Chris Cartwright and Paul Wilkinson, is currently expanding its operations to 16 airports in Eastern Europe.

Wilkinson reports that the company is offering coordination assistance and for the time being is not trying to set up a ground handling company. Feras’ business is based on providing enhanced services by working closely with local companies.

“Basically we go into any given location, there may be up to ten different vendors for things like catering and several different handling companies that offer a variety of services. Feras finds out which is the most reliable and then contracts with the appropriate company,” said Wilkinson.

The company supervises all the relevant needs of the customer moving through an airport including, for example, hotels, crew transport and hangarage.

Progress is already underway in setting-up eastern European services. Wilkinson went on to say, “We are up and running in Prague, Warsaw and several other locations inside Poland, and also Budapest. We have our agreement in place in Croatia, but have not had any flights there yet. Our first flight to Riga in Latvia took place at the begining of March.”

Central to Feras’ decision to expand was the Russian economic crisis of 1998. “Everything looked pretty dark to us in 1998,” Wilkinson continued. “We didn’t have any flights, a few of the European charter operators were coming in, like Lauda Air, but all of the big heavy corporate US traffic was waiting to see what happened – that scared us.”

Traffic has recently recovered in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). For a time corporate traffic, along with everything else, had been hit very hard.

“The number of flights being handled fell dramatically. Several Russians had been considering purchasing aircraft – this option disappeared,” added Wilkinson.

He remembers things changing for the better in June 2000: “At about the same time as Bill Clinton visited Russia, I remember thinking that we were going to get through the economic problems. We were working with all the US government aircraft and then more Europeans started coming.”

Wilkinson points out that since then a definite shift in the type of traffic from big US corporations to European corporate charter has occurred.

There is relief for Feras in the knowledge that Moscow traffic seems to have recovered almost back to the levels before the crisis. However, looking at the overall scene, the figures are well below those from before the 1998 crisis. “December was as busy a month in Moscow as any, but the CIS countries’ figures are still well below those of three years ago,” continued Wilkinson.