YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 19, NOYAN TAPAN. The Armavia airline recently reached an agreement with Sabena Technics company (Belgium) on founding a joint venture Armavia Tecnics. The owner of Armavia, president of Mika Limited company Mikhail Baghdasarov said at the November 17 press conference that the enteprise will operate in the territory of Zvartnots Airport and be engaged in technical servicing of planes. According to him, negotiations are being conducted for the purchase of small 50-seat planes of Canadian production and A-319 planes. The small planes will be brought into Armenia this year, while A-319 planes - in November 2008. The negotiations on the purchase of two planes of Russian production have been completed with VTB bank (Russia), and the credit agreement will be signed by late 2007. M. Baghdasarov said that it only remains to solve some technical issues for opening Yerevan - Los Angeles flights. The Georgian actor Vakhtang Kikiabidze has been invited to participate in the commercial advertizing Yerevan - Los Angeles flights. Besides, Armavia plans to operate new flights to China and India. In the words of M. Baghdasarov, not servicing Yerevan - Aleppo and Yerevan - Beirut flights by the Turkish aviation authorities is not so much a technical issue. They were informed by the RA foreign ministry that negotiations are continuing and the flights will resume soon. It was announced that in 2007, Armavia has transported 500 thousand passengers, which exceeds by 26% the index of the same period of last year. As a result, 2.5 billion drams has been transferred to the state budget, another 2.7 billion drams has been paid for the air.

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