Fokker 70 | 1995

Airline - Georgian Airways
Aircraft - Fokker 70 | 4L-FOA
Delivered to Georgian Airways, 1995
Stored at Teruel, 2015
Scrapped at Teruel, 2016
Livery - Standard 1995
Country - Georgia

Between 1995 and 1997, Georgian Airways took delivery of its first Western aircraft type - eight Fokker 70s, seating seventy eight passengers in an all-economy configuration. These aircraft replaced all the airline's Il-18s and two of the An-24s (the other four were displaced to operating mostly domestic flights, plus some international ones out of Batumi). The airline's new Fokker 70s were utilized in a variety of roles, flying to nearby capital cities like Yerevan and Baku, as well as to destinations farther afield like Tehran, Sharjah, Amman, Tel Aviv, Bucharest, etc. They were also utilized extensively on flights to fellow former Soviet states such as Ukraine (flying to Lviv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Simferopol, etc) and Russia (Rostov-on-Don, Sochi, Krasnodar, and even as far north as St Petersburg).

Apart from being a new modern aircraft type, the Fokker 70 also introduced a completely new livery, as it was the first aircraft operated by the airline that hadn't been taken over from Sovnaravia and therefore didn't wear the old Sovnaravia livery. The new design still incorporated the ancient Kingdom of Geornia flag (which would later once again become the official flag of modern-day Georgia) on the tail, however the fuselage was completely different, from the repurposed Sovnaravia design, now consisting of a red cheatline capped with an angled gradient at the front. This new design was meant to give the airline more of a modern image and increase trust in the brand both at home in Georgia and abroad.