Central Asia’s cargo corridor comes of age

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A year and a half ago, when disrupted airspace over Iran and the wider Gulf forced airlines and freight forwarders to redraw their maps overnight, Central Asia was still, for most of the industry, an improvised workaround — a set of unfamiliar routings tested out of necessity rather than choice. Preparing the third edition of the Central Asia Air Cargo Summit, which brings the industry to Tashkent on September 30–October 1, 2026, I have spent this year talking to airlines, freight forwarders, airport operators, customs officials and government leaders across the region. The conversation has changed. Nobody is asking any more whether Central Asia belongs on the map. The questions now are about capacity, standards and who moves fastest to shape the corridor before it hardens into its final form.

This is a longer, more detailed look at how that shift happened, who is driving it, and what still stands between a corridor that is growing and one that is genuinely durable.

FROM EMERGENCY ROUTING TO STANDING POLICY

What began as tactical rerouting has become deliberate state policy, and nowhere is that clearer than in Uzbekistan. Rather than treat each geopolitical shock as a one-off event to manage, Tashkent has built a multi-vector transport strategy explicitly designed to reduce dependence on any single neighbor, corridor or mode. The government has rebranded the country’s own geography, moving the national narrative from “landlocked” to “land-linked” — a framing that shows up consistently in ministerial speeches and in the capital allocation behind it.

That capital allocation is substantial and increasingly visible beyond Uzbekistan’s own borders. Investment has gone into airport upgrades and rail-road-air interfaces at home, but also into equity positions in overseas logistics infrastructure. The clearest example is on the Black Sea: Uzbekistan is building an $18.3 million multi-purpose terminal — cold storage, a 5,000-square-metre warehouse, and combined bulk and container handling — inside Georgia’s Poti Free Industrial Zone, and is separately exploring a stake in the new Anaklia deep-sea port now under construction on Georgia’s coast. Tashkent and Tbilisi have set a bilateral trade target of $1 billion, with the Poti buildout explicitly framed as Uzbekistan’s own gateway to European markets rather than something it must rent from others. A country does not buy port capacity a thousand kilometers from its own coastline unless it expects to be moving freight through that corridor for decades, not quarters.

THE PEOPLE TRANSLATING STRATEGY INTO OPERATIONS

Strategy documents only matter if someone executes against them, and in this region the individuals driving implementation are as important as the policies themselves.

Deputy Minister of Transport Jasurbek Choriev sits at the center of Uzbekistan’s aviation push, and his influence over the wider corridor grew significantly this year. In May 2026, the 18th meeting of the TRACECA Intergovernmental Commission in Astana elected him Secretary General of the TRACECA Permanent Secretariat, a regional post he now holds alongside his ministry role. His campaign platform for the post — “From coordination to operational leadership” — captures how he frames priorities generally: in tonnage figures, turnaround benchmarks and corridor throughput rather than purely political language. Since taking on the TRACECA role he has been the region’s most visible spokesperson on multimodal strategy, discussing everything from the New Tashkent International Airport’s June 2026 groundbreaking to a prospective Uzbek commercial and ferry fleet on the Caspian Sea at a Brussels connectivity conference. Under his oversight, Uzbekistan has committed publicly to doubling air-cargo volumes, repositioning regional airports around dedicated cargo functions, and folding aviation policy into the country’s broader land-linked connectivity agenda rather than treating it as a standalone sector.

On the operating side, Abdulaziz Abdurakhmanov, Founder and CEO of Centrum Air and Centrum Holding, brings a full ground-to-air view that is unusual among airline leaders in the region. His career runs through airport ground handling, senior charter and cargo roles at Uzbekistan Airways, and now the build-out of an integrated airline and logistics platform under Centrum. That background means he evaluates corridor development the way an operator does — gate capacity, ground-handling consistency, block times and unit economics all weighed together, rather than treated as separate workstreams owned by separate departments.

What struck me most in conversations around Tashkent, Bukhara and other emerging logistics nodes was the consistency of language across both government and industry. Officials and executives alike kept returning to measurable throughput, credible delivery timelines and realistic traffic projections — not glossy masterplans detached from operational reality. That discipline, more than any single infrastructure announcement, is what convinces me this cycle is different from earlier waves of regional connectivity rhetoric.

WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SHOW

Rhetoric aside, the traffic data now supports the narrative rather than merely accompanying it. Tashkent International Airport’s cargo terminal processed 88,080 tonnes in 2025 and 48,189.6 tonnes in the first half of 2026 alone, a 33.2% year-on-year increase. Nationally, Uzbekistan’s airports handled 98,137 tonnes of cargo and mail in 2025, up from 95,049 tonnes the year before, while Kazakhstan’s airports remain the region’s largest disclosed cargo market at 173,300 tonnes, up from 170,900.

Set against the global backdrop, that regional growth looks even more notable. IATA reported worldwide air cargo demand up 8.5% year-on-year in June 2026, with Asia-Pacific carriers posting 7.9% growth and European carriers 6.9%, while February 2026 had already marked the 36th consecutive month of growth on the Europe-Asia lane specifically, at 13.1% year-on-year. Central Asia’s volumes remain smaller in absolute terms than the established Gulf and East Asian hubs, but the growth rate is consistently outpacing the global average — precisely the pattern you would expect from a corridor transitioning from marginal to structural.

NEW CAPACITY ARRIVING ON MULTIPLE FRONTS AT ONCE

What differentiates 2026 from earlier phases of regional cargo growth is how many independent parties are adding capacity simultaneously, rather than a single flag carrier expanding alone.

Stratos Freight, now Uzbekistan’s fifth dedicated freight operator, took delivery of its first Boeing 757-200PCF earlier this year and has announced plans to add two Boeing 767 freighters by year-end. Emirates SkyCargo opened its first Central Asian gateway in June 2026, launching a dedicated weekly Boeing 777F service to Almaty — a meaningful signal given Emirates’ selectivity about where it deploys freighter capacity. My Freighter, meanwhile, added daily cargo flights from Liège covering Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan starting in August 2026, layered on top of an interline agreement signed earlier in the year with China Southern Airlines that extends its network reach into China.

Three different operator types — a new regional freight carrier, a Gulf major, and a European independent with a Chinese interline partner — arriving at the same conclusion in the same year is a far stronger signal than any one of these moves in isolation.

RAIL IS NOT COMPETING WITH AIR — IT IS LEGITIMIZING THE WHOLE CORRIDOR

The single development most likely to reshape long-term planning assumptions for air cargo in this region is not an aviation story at all. The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan (CKU) railway, under active construction since mid-2025, had reached more than 40% tunnel-excavation progress on its Kyrgyz section by mid-2026, with over 5,000 workers and 5,600 pieces of equipment deployed on site. Uzbekistan’s president told the Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting in Samarkand in May that the line is expected to cut cargo delivery times by up to ten days, and Choriev — in his TRACECA capacity — suggested in June that completion could land in 2028–2029, ahead of the official 2030 target.

A faster, higher-capacity rail spine does not cannibalize air cargo demand in this market — it validates the entire multimodal thesis governments have been selling to investors and shippers. The wider Middle Corridor (Trans-Caspian International Transport Route) has already grown more than fivefold over seven years to surpass 4.5 million tonnes annually, with Kazakhstan targeting 5.2 million tonnes in 2026 and container traffic aiming for 300,000 TEU by 2029, up from roughly 77,000 TEU in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 125 container trains crossed Kazakhstan via the corridor, a 34.4% increase year-on-year. When governments underwrite this kind of multimodal redundancy as deliberate policy rather than crisis improvisation, it changes how seriously global logistics planners treat the region in their long-term network design.

FIVE TESTS THAT WILL DECIDE WHETHER THIS LASTS

None of this growth removes the harder questions that determine whether a corridor becomes permanent infrastructure or reverts to a crisis-only fallback once traditional routes stabilize. Based on this year’s conversations, I would frame five tests, expanding on the three I highlighted when this corridor first began drawing global attention:

• Reliability at scale. Customs digitalization and consistent ground-handling standards must keep pace with volume growth across more airports and more operators simultaneously — not simply hold up under the more modest traffic levels of eighteen months ago. Uzbekistan Customs’ ongoing digital transformation push is a concrete, trackable test case here.
• Product depth beyond general cargo. Cold-chain and e-commerce infrastructure — exactly what Uzbekistan is now building at Poti and expanding at its own airports — needs to scale quickly enough to capture higher-value freight, especially as global e-commerce volumes face headwinds from new EU duty rules affecting low-value parcel imports.
• Execution discipline across parallel megaprojects. A transnational railway, a Black Sea terminal, and a prospective deep-sea port stake are all being pursued at once. Sequencing and financing discipline — not ambition — will determine whether these become one integrated network or several disconnected, undercapitalized bets.
• Regulatory and legal predictability. In an environment shaped by sanctions regimes and shifting conflict-zone advisories, routing decisions increasingly hinge on legal certainty as much as geography. Stable overflight rights, open-skies frameworks and alignment with international trade rules will determine whether corporate risk committees treat Central Asia as a durable option or a temporary workaround to be abandoned the moment traditional lanes normalize.
• Talent and institutional capacity. Doubling cargo volumes, standing up new freight carriers, and running multiple megaprojects in parallel all require a deeper bench of trained aviation, logistics and customs professionals than the region has historically needed. How quickly training pipelines and institutional capacity scale will quietly determine execution speed on everything above.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR THE INDUSTRY MEETING IN TASHKENT THIS FALL

For airlines, freight forwarders, GSSAs, leasing companies, airport operators and cargo technology providers, the strategic question has moved on from whether Central Asia deserves network attention. The tonnage growth, the fleet orders arriving from three different types of operators, and the scale of infrastructure investment already answer that. The live question now is who positions early enough to help set the corridor’s operating standards, routings and commercial partnerships before they solidify — because once ground-handling protocols, slot allocations and preferred-partner relationships are established, they tend to persist for years.

That is exactly the conversation the Central Asia Air Cargo Summit #3 is built to host in Tashkent on September 30–October 1, 2026. The event will bring together more than 300 senior decision-makers from airlines, airports, freight forwarders, cargo terminal operators, GSSAs, e-commerce platforms and technology providers, alongside the region’s first-ever IATA Air Cargo Round Table — a genuinely new addition to the regional calendar and a signal in itself of how seriously the industry’s top institutional body now treats this corridor. Whether you already operate here or are still assessing entry timing, this is the room where the next phase of standard-setting will happen in person, not just in policy papers.

The disruption phase that first put Central Asia on the map is over. What comes next — turning a corridor that worked during a crisis into one the global industry chooses to use every single day — is the harder, more interesting, and ultimately more consequential work. I look forward to continuing that conversation with the region’s operators, regulators and partners in Tashkent this September.

Olga Rybak is CEO of ATO COMM, organizer of the Central Asia Air Cargo Summit and Central Asia Aviation Summit series. For registration and program details for the Central Asia Air Cargo Summit #3 (Tashkent, September 30–October 1, 2026), visit www.atocomm.eu.