Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, has launched its maiden flight to Astana in Kazakhstan from its Abu Dhabi home base. Flight EY294 took off from Abu Dhabi on Thursday morning (May 7) at 10.05am and landed at 4.35pm the same day at Astana airport. The Kazakhstan capital is now served, once a week from Abu Dhabi, with the airline using an Airbus A319 aircraft.

Astana is the second destination in Kazakhstan to be served by Etihad and the airline’s 52nd across its expanding global flight network. The start of the new service follows the launch by Etihad in December 2008 of flights to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. To facilitate the launch, Etihad’s current four times a week service to Almaty has been reduced to three times a week.

The timing of the new weekly service offers air travellers convenient onward connections, via Abu Dhabi, onto a significant number of other key destinations across Etihad’s global network, particularly across the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

Since gaining independence in October 1990, Kazakhstan has benefited from major foreign investment, particularly in the oil and gas sector which has brought rapid economic growth to the country.

Kazakhstan is already among the world's top 20 oil producers and expects to be one the world's top oil exporters in the next decade or two, as foreign investment in new pipelines continues. The country is expected to pump more than 3.5 million barrels of oil a day in the coming decade. It also has ambitions to pump up to 45 billion cubic metres of natural gas a year by 2015.

Etihad operates a two-class Airbus A319 configured to carry 110 passengers with 20 seats in business class and 90 in economy class.