Aerostan moved 11,800 tonnes of cargo on 554 flights in 2025, down from 14,300 tonnes across 743 flights the year before — a 17% volume drop that tells you more about 2024's distortion than about the Kyrgyz carrier's health.

The Bishkek-based operator runs three Boeing 747-200 freighters, each lifting 100 tonnes, and serves 105 international destinations. That's the whole fleet. Three aircraft, none of them young, covering Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America and the CIS from a landlocked country of fewer than seven million people.

For context: a single major integrator hub handles more freight in a week than Aerostan flies in a year. Yet almost no carrier of any size matches its geographic reach per airframe.

Where the freight actually goes

The network splits into 35 Asian destinations, 27 in Africa, 15 in the CIS, 14 in South America and 13 in the Middle East. The top five markets are the UAE, China, Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil. Not one of them borders Kyrgyzstan, and only China comes close.

That's the tell. Aerostan isn't a regional flag carrier feeding its home market — there isn't much of one to feed. It's a global charter and ad hoc freight operator that follows the cargo, wherever the cargo happens to be.

And the cargo it chases is heavy: oil and gas equipment, mining machinery, outsized industrial loads, bulk commodities that don't fit on a newer narrowbody freighter. This is precisely the freight that keeps a 50-year-old 747 design commercially alive while flashier fleets have moved on. If it's awkward, overweight and urgent, Aerostan wants the call.

The operating environment helps too. Lower costs in Kyrgyzstan, a relatively permissive regulatory framework, and the flexibility of a lean three-aircraft operation let the carrier build a network that an airline ten times its size would struggle to replicate quickly. Scale has its advantages. So does not having any.

What does the 2025 decline actually mean?

Look at the trajectory. Aerostan carried just under 6,000 tonnes on 447 flights in 2022, then 13,000 tonnes on 690 flights in 2023, then the 2024 peak. Growth was real and it was fast — roughly doubling volume in two years.

But 2023 and 2024 were unusually kind to Central Asian carriers. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 pushed freight flows away from Russian overland corridors and Russian airspace, and operators in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan absorbed significant volumes as a result. Some of that windfall was always going to normalise. In 2025, part of it did.

So what does this change for shippers and forwarders with outsized industrial cargo? Less than the headline suggests. A 17% volume drop at a charter operator reflects fewer windfall routings, not lost capability. The three 747s, the 100-tonne payloads and the 105-destination reach are all still there.

Is the Central Asian diversion structural or temporary?

That's the question that decides Aerostan's 2026. Recovery depends on whether the structural shift in Eurasian freight routing — away from Russia, and increasingly away from the Gulf — keeps channelling demand through Central Asia at the levels of recent years.

The early signs, per the carrier's own account, suggest it will. If it does, Aerostan's position is stronger than almost anyone outside Kyrgyzstan realises: a network built quietly over years, without industry fanfare, sitting directly on the lane the freight is already using.

If the flows drift back, three 747-200s with niche heavy-cargo demand behind them still make a workable business. Awkward freight doesn't stop being awkward. But the growth story — the doubling, the record years — belongs to the diversion, not the airline, and 2026 will show how much of it sticks.

By Amara Osei, Waybill Wire