I flew with Uzbekistan Airways across the Silk Road to discover the country and its latest aviation scenes. My trip to Uzbekistan covers 3 cities; Tashkent, Samarkand and Khiva.

My friend Charles and I flew on Uzbekistan Airways B787 Dreamliner from Dubai to Tashkent. During the flight, I discovered the service onboard. The airline serve some of the largest portion of food and even offer horse meat! After landing at Tashkent, we visited the former aircraft factory where Ilyushin IL76 was built, stayed in a soviet era iconic hotel; Hotel Uzbekistan and tried some local food such as plov.

The next day we took the Uzbek high-speed rail “Afrosiyab” to Samarkand. We visited the city sights and the new terminal of Samarkand Int’l Airport. New airlines such as Air Samarkand are based there. On the way back, we flew regional airline Silk Avia ATR72 back to Tashkent.

We also flew on Uzbekistan Airways A320neo to Urgench, in order to visit the historical city of Khiva, on the west side of the country. While the airport experiences are fairly basic and most airports have little or no jet bridges, the Uzbek hospitality is absolutely wonderful throughout our trip.

The potential in Uzbekistan is huge with over 35 million population but the aviation sector is still developing with one state-owned airline and a few privately run airlines. The challenges of these new airlines are limited funding, limited experience in aviation, and difficulty to recruit and sourcing airplanes. Uzbekistan is on the crossroads between East and West so it would be interesting to see how the aviation sector develop itself in the next 5 -10 years.