CAIRO, January 2 (Sputnik) — Russia suspended flights to and from Egypt after an Airbus A321 plane flying to St. Petersburg crashed in the Sinai Peninsula soon after taking off from Sharm El-Sheikh on October 31, 2015, killing all 224 people aboard.
END-OF-YEAR CHECKS
According to Egypt's civil aviation authority, while there have been no new information on lifting the restrictions, the two sides agreed to exchange visits in January, but Russian experts had given a positive assessment to the equipment and security measures at the airport.
It is unclear how many checks it will take to resume the flights between the two countries. A few deadlines for the resumption had already been forecast with none of the predictions having come true so far, but discussions of air travel between presidents of Russia and Egypt seem to offer some hope.
YEAR OF HARD WORK
The Egyptian authorities have said repeatedly that everything possible had been done and continued to be done to ensure the utmost security and safety at Egypt airports.
"We are now proud that the security measures at our airports are harsher than at a number of busy airports of European cities," Mahmoud Qatt, an expert at the accident investigation department at the Ministry of Civil Aviation, told RIA Novosti.
"In any case, Egypt fulfilled all its obligations in terms of security and equipment. It has to be noted that the representatives of different countries, who had visited Egyptian airports, remarked on a significant progress," Okasha told RIA Novosti.
GOAL OF 10 MILLION TOURISTS
Egyptian Minister of Tourism Mohamed Yehia Rashed said in the end of the last year that 2017 could be the time of the rebirth of the tourism business.
"The ministry of tourism has set a goal to accommodate 10 million tourists in 2017. This would signify the return to the 2015 level," the minister said.
At the moment, the number of tourists in the country is slowly growing, with some countries resuming air travel and others promising to do it in the near future. Egyptian experts are certain that the tourists will come back en masse when Russia lifts the ban on travel.
IMPROVEMENT IN SIGHT
Tourism needs government's help to stay afloat, at least, those hotels that remain open and thus lose money, according to the experts, interviewed by the Egyptian news outlet Veto.
The minister of tourism said that 5.3 million tourists came to Egypt in 2016, which is a 40-percent drop compared to the previous year.
"However, an improvement could be seen by the end of the year, and we are certain that the sector will soon return to its usual results," the minister said.
Rashed urged the tourism professionals to keep up their effort to modernize the sector and maintain its attractiveness for foreigners.