On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 12:27:28 PM UTC-7, John DeRosa OHM Ω http://aviation.derosaweb.net wrote:
If you build it (a cornfield) they will come (a landout).

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

It helps if you put your cornfield two miles off the end of the runway at a busy airport.

Zhukovsky is a strange beast. It's fundamentally a military airfield. The bin-annual MAKS airshow is held there (I attended in 2015, soon after I started living in Russia). It's where you used to be able to buy a supersonic and/or edge of space MIG-29 flight

While I was in Russia they repurposed Zhukovsky as Moscow's 4th civilian International Airport. This was done very quickly, with very little infrastructure. They whacked up a terminal building in a couple of months and opened the place, pretty much. I thought the idea was to operate european discount airlines such as EasyJet from there. I didn't know they were doing domestic services.

It's very much the poor step-sister of the other three airports located N, W, and S of Moscow. The others have all got motorways and a dedicated railway line to them -- the Aeroexpress train takes 35 minutes (Vnukovo and Sheremetyevo) or 45 minutes (Domodedovo) from each airport to different railway stations each located about 3 to 4 km from the Kremlin on the Garden Ring road and metro Circle Line. You can drive/taxi in about the same amount of time (but from home, not from a railway station) if traffic is light, but if it's not .. I've once taken two hours to taxi from home to Vnukovo.

The way things work in Russia, if someone at the top wants Zhukovshy and its connections to the city developed quickly then everything could be utterly different in five years from now.