Novy Urengoy is a city in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and the gas production capital of Russia, where about 75% of all natural gas in the country is produced. All this turns Novy Urengoy into a city with an active economy, industry, and connections with other parts of the state.
Air connections to the city
The airport in Novy Urengoy is located four kilometers from the city center and is equipped to receive both passenger and cargo aircraft in Novy Urengoy. There are also several helipads on the airfield. Air transportation to Novy Urengoy is carried out by several companies, namely Transaero, Aeroflot, U-Tair, S7 and others. There are seasonal flights to the southern destinations of the country, as well as year-round flights to the largest cities in Russia. Communication using helicopters in Novy Urengoy is carried out only in local and intraregional cases.
The airport in Novy Urengoy has a small area. On the ground floor there are ticket offices and food outlets, and on the second floor there are several waiting rooms. Due to the fact that the building and the surrounding area were placed at the disposal of local authorities, the organization is experiencing slight problems with financing at this stage of time.
Helicopter service in Novy Urengoy
The helipad in Novy Urengoy is located both on the airfield and in several places in the city itself. Helicopter transportation in Novy Urengoy is most often associated with local weather conditions, as well as the mobile transfer of labor or small cargo from one point to another.
Flight Destinations
In addition to connections with large cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Novosibirsk and others, the city also has connections with small villages located on the territory of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. For example, the Novy Urengoy Sabetta plane is regular. Tickets for the Novy Urengoy Sabetta flight can be purchased both at the airport ticket office and using numerous online services. The cargo flight Novy Urengoy Sabetta can be serviced by Severtek along with other major and local destinations throughout the country.
If you are interested in the services of the Severtek transport company, contact us by phone or leave a request on the official website of the organization, indicating your name and contact phone number.
March 12th, 2017
I couldn’t pass by - a very rare Yamal aviation in the frame.
Note to amateurs: "...leaflets of safety instructions are issued by the commander before takeoff, and apparently careless passengers got the helicopter pilots so fed up with taking these instructions away as a keepsake that after landing these pieces of paper serve as a collective pass to exit."
Original taken from varandej in Selkupiy. Part 1: in the blue helicopter
The main goal of my recent trip to the North and the Urals was the abandoned village of Dolgy on the Taz River, in the mysterious Selkupa - the southeastern corner of the gigantic Yamalo-Nenets Okrug. There is a station of the dead Transpolar Railway, in everyday life just abandoned steam locomotives, to which I attached all other points like carriages, considering it irrational to travel thousands of kilometers for several days. But Dolgy itself is by far the most inaccessible place I have ever been: fifty kilometers by motor boat from the nearest village of Krasnoselkup, where, in turn, you still have to fly from Novy Urengoy by helicopter. I’ll start the story with a helicopter voyage, this completely new way of traveling for me.
The beginning of the trip turned out to be planned very irrationally: the fact is that I exchanged an air ticket from Moscow to Urengoy for a ticket to Moscow from Nadym - I went to the latter in March on Reindeer Herder Day, but closer to the point, the prospect of going on an all-terrain expedition across the tundra fell upon me from Voruta, and of course I couldn’t miss this chance. By the standards of the Far North, helicopters fly to Krasnoselkup often, almost every day, in turn from Novy Urengoy and Tarko-Sale, but the summer schedule turned out to not coincide with the winter one, and although I changed the ticket in such a way as to spend several hours in Novy Urengoy , in the end it turned out that I flew here for a day. However, this is, in principle, the specificity of traveling in the Far North - long waits for transport in uninteresting places.
However, in this sense, I was not alone: the vast majority of passengers arrived at the small and uncomfortable airport of New Urengoy in transit, some were waiting for rotations in the square in front of the airport, but the path of most rotation workers lay further by plane and helicopters - to Sabetta, Yamburg, Vankor and many other places to extract our Russian budget from the frozen ground. Just like on my last visit, I rented a bed from the Azerbaijani Arys for 1,500 rubles, but everything that could be booked in advance was even more expensive, and I absolutely did not want to look for something on the spot. Due to pressure testing, there was still no hot water in the apartment, and all my neighbors were waiting for flights to Sabetta, a recently built rotational town for 19 thousand people, serving a gas port at the northern edge of the Yamal Peninsula.
The first thing I saw in Urengoy was thick brown smog, and when I stepped out onto the ramp, inhaling the dry Siberian air, I felt a strong smell of burning. The scale of the disaster was, of course, not the same as in Moscow 2010, but quite at the level of Moscow 2002, and after looking at the online satellite map from Arysov Wi-Fi, I realized that I had arrived in the very heart of the forest fires that had engulfed Siberia. On the day of returning from Selkupia, the wind was blowing in the other direction, and one of them was clearly visible from the Urengoy airport - and when I just arrived in Urengoy from Moscow, all this smoke covered the city:
It looked something like this, and there was something Kazakhstani in the appearance of the sultry summer Nur - high-rise buildings on sandy wastelands, an abundance of southern faces and clothes, a general feeling of uncomfortable uninhabitedness.
But even the heat cannot hide the color of oil and gas Yugoria. “Six-legged” trekols scurry around the industrial zone separating the airport and the city:
Corporate buses with the logos of Gazprom and its subsidiaries under the windshield are constantly driving through the city:
And even here Donbass does not want to let go. In the rest of Russia they don’t write this on fences, but in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug three thousand refugees alone were identified, and how many people from those regions came on their own, on shifts and to visit relatives who had settled here long ago?
In general, after hanging around Urengoy with nothing to do, swimming in the small river Sede-Yakha, whose sandy beaches are the envy of other seas, sleeping off Arys (I found myself alone in the room, since my morning neighbor, who had been waiting for three days to board the flight to Sabetta, finally flew away) , the next morning I went to the airport again. Helicopter tickets look like this (the price tag is attached + 430 rubles of insurance), they are sold in 45 days (like for a train), and you should not look for them on the Yamal Airlines website - it is not entirely obvious that the latter are not identical to Yamal Airlines, and In local parlance, the former are called “aircraft company”, and the latter, respectively, “helicopter company”. A ticket from Urengoy to Krasnoselkup is issued via the Internet, and tickets from Krasnoselkup to Urengoy are issued only at the box office, but nevertheless they can be bought directly in Moscow. Whether there are congestion here, when, due to several days of bad weather, people who have accumulated at the airport are put on board on a first-come, first-served basis (of course, stretching for weeks), I still haven’t figured it out. According to the locals, delays of one or two days or flights not due to the schedule are not uncommon here, but I have not encountered this.
And although there are three separate heliports in Novy Urengoy, shift workers fly from them, and boarding on regular helicopters is exactly the same as on an airplane - check-in counters, baggage check, storage, shuttle around the airfield... The only difference is that the helicopter does not have a luggage compartment , therefore, passengers board both the departure hall and the shuttle with huge luggage, which, however, is listed as hand luggage - they may even give you a knife to carry it through, but it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to hold a gas cylinder. Helicopter passengers return from vacations, and on these vacations they go once a year with a lot of money from places where everything is expensive and everything is scarce, so they bring so much other stuff that they don’t fit into 20 kilograms per person. This, however, is also not a problem - half of the passengers know each other and, of course, will take on the excess luggage.
Helicopters wait for passengers on a separate area. We got the Mi-8, which is no wonder - this is perhaps the most popular helicopter in Russia, more than 12 thousand of them have been built since 1961, and they serve everywhere from the “flying armored personnel carriers” of the army to the “flying buses” of northern airlines.
The helicopter's cabin, to put it mildly, is not very comfortable; it can take up to 24 passengers on board:
When full, it looks like this - luggage is piled in a heap in the middle, people sit on the sides with their backs to the windows, equally on each side, so as not to cause a list. On the right are leaflets of safety instructions, they are given out by the commander before takeoff, and apparently careless passengers are so fed up with the helicopter pilots by stealing these instructions as a keepsake that after landing these leaflets serve as a collective pass to exit.
Passengers communicate noisily, share impressions from their vacations, but at some point the engine roars piercingly and the blades with a heavy whistle begin to spin faster and faster, and a fine, harsh vibration runs through the windows. It becomes possible to talk only by shouting into your neighbor's ear. I expected the helicopter to take off straight from the spot, but instead it taxied onto the runway, drove to the very beginning and only there almost imperceptibly took off from the ground and went up a steep diagonal. This is what NUR airport looks like from above - on the left is the pink air terminal with white planes, on the right is the heliport, along this path our car taxied, but I never saw a helicopter traveling on the ground from the outside.
The porthole does not sparkle with cleanliness, and most of the shots were taken on the way back, when the wind dispersed the smog of the fires. Novy Urengoy itself remains on the left side, and this is what it looks like from a height of “from 150 to 300 meters.” 115 thousand people live here, I suspect thousands more are on shifts and passing through. The structure of the city is clearly visible, stretched between the rivers Varenga-Yakha (winding in the frame below) and the merging Tomchara-Yakha and Sede-Yakha, behind the dark forest along which on the left you can see a special Northern district - compared to the Southern one, it is smaller, neater and that’s where it is located most public facilities from the city hall to the Victory Memorial. In the foreground is an endless industrial zone of various warehouses and technical bases. The nature around Urengoy - as you can see, forest-tundra with rare larch needles stuck into a moss cushion:
We walk above the center - from a helicopter the views are similar to those from a skyscraper. The southern district is divided into older “numbered” and newer “named” microdistricts. Here in the frame it is the latter - the colorful high-rise buildings of the Optimist microdistrict, which is unlike the rest of the city in its neatness and comfort, the more modest development of the Sozidatelei and Polyarny microdistricts a little closer, and finally the barracks of the SMP-700 and Yagelny microdistricts. The houses in the background are squeezed in a narrow strip between the dreary Novy Urengoy - Nadym railway and the Tamchara-Yakhi cliff, and on the left behind a gray five-story building you can discern the minaret of a mosque:
To the right, between the Optimists and Enthusiasts microdistricts, there is the Church of the Epiphany, behind it the embankment of the railway is visible, and the houses in the bend of Tamchara-Yakhi mark the place where on September 22, 1973, geologists hammered a peg with the inscription “Yagelnoye” - the beginning of the future city near the supergiant Urengoy deposit gas. But notice how much sand there is! The natural Sahara is hidden under the moss and grasses of Yamal and Ugra:
The old “registered” microdistricts are St. Petersburg “ship houses” on vacant lots, in one of which I spent the night. The huge red building in the foreground is the office of Gazpromdobycha-Yamburg, located here due to the closed nature of Yamburg itself, a rotational city a couple of hundred kilometers north of Urengoy. The Yamburg field is the second largest in Russia after the Urengoy field itself, that is, NUR’s reputation as the “gas capital” is well deserved. In the opening of the street to the right of the high-rise buildings you can discern a blue station, at the left edge of the frame there is a green Mi-8 on the roof of the Helicopter shopping center, and in the background is the compact and high Northern District.
Then there are only endless warehouses and industrial zones, parallel to the highway and the railway, which will remain inseparable until Noyabrsk itself, and a monument at the R-1 exploration well, which was discovered by the expedition of Vladmir Polupanov in 1966 at the Urengoyskoye field. I described all this in more detail in my post about the city, but what’s impressive is how small details are visible from a helicopter flying low (from 150 to 300 meters) and slowly (or rather, quickly by “ground” standards).
But here and there - swamps, countless small lakes, winding rivers, cunning patterns of deserted land:
In some rivers the bottom is visible. A trained eye would probably be able to distinguish animals running away at the noise of the propellers:
But I took most of these shots, as already mentioned, on the way back. And on the way “there” in the sultry calm, the earth looked more like this:
A small example of a forest fire, this most terrible predator of forests and steppes:
And his traces:
The view of these spaces is approximately the same for the entire hour and a half of the flight, but for the first half hour, about 70 kilometers, you can also see a road with scurrying cars below - alas, I only flew with a view of it on a “smoky” day, so I couldn’t take a photo (or rather, how again smog and photographed). On the other hand (if you fly from Urengoy - on the left), after half an hour of flight Limbayakha (2.8 thousand inhabitants) floats by:
On the lake with the unpronounceable name Yamylimuyagunto:
It was founded in 1983 for the construction of the Urengoy State District Power Plant, quite small (489 MW) and seemingly absolutely modern:
In 1988, Limbayakha became an urban-type settlement, and in 2004 it became part of New Urengoy as its remote area. From a helicopter it’s easy to look right into the yard:
In general, there is a junction of three villages here - a little further on the starboard side you can see Korotchaevo (6.9 thousand inhabitants), a village of railway workers, the final station of Russian Railways and the starting station of the Yamal railway company, which leases both the Urengoy station and the line to Nadym. The latter runs right along the route of the former Construction-501, Stalin’s Dead Road, which was supposed to connect the mouth of the Ob with the mouth of the Yenisei, and to which my goal Dolgy also belonged. Somewhere here is the Tikhaya station, where the line, restored in the 1960s and 70s, turns off the 501 construction route to the south. A huge pit is also visible here - this is the Tyumen superdeep well, one of the “younger sisters” of the legendary Kola superdeep well, drilled in 1987-96 to a depth of 7502 meters.
Korotchaev Center with the Annunciation Church. Alas, no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t get the station in my shot, and I didn’t get any successful shots with the Urengoy port located here. We will see Korotchaevo more closely in a post about the railways of the Yugra North:
And we cross the Pur - it shares the same mouth with the Taz in the Tazovskaya Bay, which in turn flows into the Ob Bay and forms such a characteristic blue "h" or lambda (" λ ") on the map of Eurasia. The Pur, in turn, itself merges from two rivers Aivasedpur and Pyakupur, and together with the latter its length is 1024 kilometers, the water flow at the mouth is 1040 cubic meters per second - that is, it is a river on the scale of the Don. The Pur was also of particular importance in the history of the Transpolar Railway, distinguishing Stroika-501, which stretched the path from Salekhard to the east and still reached the embankment, and Stroika-503, which went from the bank of the Yenisei to the west, but only reached Taz. In the interfluve of Taza and Pura (in this frame it is on the right) the railway workers - civilians and prisoners - never had time to get there, only a telegraph line passed there.
On the starboard side two narrow floating bridges over the Pur and another village are clearly visible:
This is Urengoy itself (10.1 thousand inhabitants), which gave its name to the largest gas field, but itself remained aloof from oil and gas. It was founded in 1932 as a trading post - that is, a point where the Nenets handed over the products of their economy and received or bought the necessary goods; on the Transpolar Highway it was preparing to serve as a central station with a base depot, and in 1966 it was here that gas detector geologists were based. The urban-type settlement of Urengoy became a year earlier than Novy Urengoy became a city - in 1979, but the urban-type settlement remained that way. There is the Vvedenskaya Church and the Polyarnaya Hotel with a tent cafe in the courtyard, but in general, in the guidebook I had, Urengoy is described as “one of the most uninteresting and poor villages in Yamal.” And although officially this is Urengoy “by default”, and that city is New Urengoy, in practice it’s the other way around - there it is Urengoy “by request”, and in everyday life this is Old Urengoy.
In general, it is not entirely obvious that what distinguishes our Far North from the foreign north is not emptiness, but, on the contrary, habitability, especially here, where oil or gas is produced. In some places the pipelines themselves are visible, apparently coming from Vankor in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.
So we flew for an hour and a half, I didn’t have the opportunity to look out the window all the time (after all, I was sitting with my back to the window), but looking out, I saw the same thing over and over again: swamps, rivers, lakes, forests, tundras, roads, compressor stations , fires, and helicopter blades flashing overhead... At some point, a large river appeared ahead, in which I, of course, immediately recognized the Taz: its length is 1401 kilometers, and the flow rate at the mouth is up to 1450 cubic meters per second, that is, on average within a year it emerges as a river of the size of the Oka. We flew over the Taz through the plume of a large fire, which we would see from a motor boat:
A car ferry is slowly moving along the Taz - you can get here not only by helicopter, this vessel (I already showed these last year in a post about the fleet of northern rivers) will drag for a day to the village of Gaz-Sale (Gas Cape) already on Tazovskaya Bay, and from there more 300 kilometers of road to Novy Urengoy. I don’t remember exactly how much it costs to spend on such a car - it seems that one is significantly more expensive than a helicopter ticket, but for three or four it is clearly cheaper. You can also travel as a passenger for free - this is a note for hitchhikers.
The helicopter over the river noticeably descends, and across the river one meets the large and colorful Krasnoselkup (6 thousand inhabitants) - the village-regional center of the most unusual region of the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug - only here in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug they do not produce oil and gas, and only here, in addition to the usual Nenets and Khanty, live another people are the Selkups, after whom the Taz valley itself is often called Selkupa.
The village justifies its name - its favorite color is really red, and despite the absence of nearby deposits, it is perhaps the most well-groomed rural settlement in Russia. The huge multi-colored building in the center of the frame is a school, behind it is a long-term sports palace, to the right of the school under a gable roof is a museum with a micro-scansen in the courtyard, and near the shore is the wooden church of Vasily Mangazeisky.
In Krasnoselkup there is an airfield with a runway longer than the village itself, but only this runway is unpaved and therefore planes rarely fly on it:
A wooden airport terminal, perhaps without carved frames, and a helicopter from the Turukhan airline, apparently sent here from the neighboring Krasnoyarsk Territory to put out fires - later I will show it in action:
Let's sit down. In Krasnoselkup the smog is so dense that photographs appear sepia; such a dense vileness that even in the village many walk around in encephalitis. From the first seconds you understand how far you have climbed.
Please note that the heliport is thoroughly wet - and this despite the fact that they have been waiting for rain here for the second month like manna from heaven. In fact, the soil is specially watered, because otherwise every helicopter takeoff and landing would turn into a local dust storm:
The company dealing with airports in the Krasnoselkup region has an unusually beautiful name. In fact, justified - after all, Mangazeya is a hundred kilometers down the Taz River.
There is also a check-in desk, a luggage scanner and a storage unit, but they are all very small. However, I have already seen a similar air terminal in Kodinsk, from where I flew not by helicopter, but by an airplane the size of a minibus. For some reason, Krasnoselkup’s old diagram hangs in the departure hall:
View of the airport from the village. Due to the lack of land roads, the entrance stele stands right here:
And in general, I want to say, I didn’t like flying a helicopter. The advantage is that a helicopter does not have such a painful descent as a small aircraft, but the flight itself at flight level is quite difficult - either pitching, or vibration, or noise, or an uncomfortable position (sideways), but rather all of the above in an hour and a half of flight it completely unsettles me; I was away from both flights for almost the entire day. Finally, the same Mi-8 in the sky, returning to Krasnoselkup from Tarko-Sale:
The next part is about Krasnoselkup itself, where I spent a total of 4 days.
NORTH-URAL-2016
Trip overview and series table of contents.
Selkupia
Helicopter over the tundra.
Krasnoselkup.
Dead road. Taz River and Dolgiy station.
Dead road. The village of Dolgiy and a hike along the line
Oil and gas region- there will be posts.
Gornozavodskoy Ural- there will be posts.
The unofficial “gas production capital” of Russia is one of the few regional cities – Novy Urengoy. Helipads for this city are simply necessary due to the inaccessibility in some places. Located in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the rivers Evo-Yakha, Tamchara-Yakha, Pura and Sede-Yakha flow through the city. And given the deployment range and the high pace of industry, the infrastructure of helipads should be developed.
The airspace itself is nothing more than a section of territory specially equipped for helicopter takeoffs and landings. A plot of land, a platform on a ship or building, on a roof or in a hangar can be used as a plot or territory. In Novy Urengoy, the helipad is located at the local airport. It is ground-based, on a solid base and, in terms of operating time, is permanent.
Since 2014, the district government has launched a program in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, which relates to the “Development of transinfrastructure for 2014-2020”. It talks about the development of airports in the district. Thus, reconstruction of helipads and their engineering infrastructure will be carried out.
The main operator of helicopter services in the district, as well as throughout the country, is UTair OJSC. They occupy the entire area at the airport. The bulk of the helicopters are located on the street, and the rest are located in hangars. Helicopters in this region mainly operate on government contracts related to industry. Private and commercial flights are most relevant to hunters, fishermen, photographers and naturalists. And taking into account the large accumulation of profitable enterprises within the borders of the remaining northern regions, helicopter transportation of local importance is carried out on an ongoing basis. The main services are the transportation of goods and people for the benefit of various enterprises.
