Dear Air Astana flyer,

I was delighted to receive an email recently from Skytrax informing us that for the 5th year in succession, we have won the award for Best Airline Central Asia and India. This is a vast territory with a lot of airlines and I would therefore like to thank both you, our customers, for your continued support, and my colleagues for their hard work in sustaining such levels of excellence in the face of a challenging economy and tough competition. It is however disappointing that one central Asian country, Mongolia, has chosen to deny its travelling public access to the region’s best airline. We still fail to understand why our operating permit was granted and then revoked, particularly since in January we passed a safety audit conducted by the Mongolian aviation authority with no findings. However, we hope that the situation can be resolved and that we will be able to welcome Mongolian and other passengers onto Astana – Ulan Bator flights in 2017.

I am delighted to say that no such problems exist with Iran services, which commenced between Almaty and Tehran on 30th June. I would like to welcome Iranian travellers to our growing network. We look forward to bringing our high standards of operational reliability and service to your country, and we hope that you will enjoy not only the Embraer flights from Tehran, but also our longer haul services to China, Korea and Southeast Asia, most of which connect conveniently to and from the Tehran flights.

Yours faithfully,

Peter Foster

President & CEO

Air Astana