Nacala Airport is an

airport An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial air transport. Airports usually consists of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surface ...

near

Nacala Nacala, also known as Cidade de Nacala or Nacala-Porto is a city on the northern coast of Mozambique. Located in the southwestern indentation of inner Fernao Veloso Bay, it is the deepest natural port on the east coast of Africa. Nacala serves as ...

, in

Nampula Province Nampula is a province of northern Mozambique. It has an area of and a population of 5,758,920, making it the most populous province in Mozambique (2017 census). Nampula is the capital of the province. History Under Portuguese rule this province ...

Mozambique Mozambique (), officially the Republic of Mozambique ( pt, Moçambique or , ; ny, Mozambiki; sw, Msumbiji; ts, Muzambhiki), is a country located in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi ...

. Formerly a military airport, it underwent a major redevelopment to convert it to commercial use. The redeveloped airport opened in 2014, but for the last three years has stood almost unused, operating at 4% capacity with only

LAM Mozambique Airlines LAM - Mozambique Airlines, S. A. (LAM - Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique, S. A.) or Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique, Ltd., operating as LAM Mozambique Airlines ( pt, LAM Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique), is the flag carrier of Mozambique. The airline ...

flying there twice a week from

Maputo Maputo (), formerly named Lourenço Marques until 1976, is the Capital city, capital, and largest city of Mozambique. Located near the southern end of the country, it is within of the borders with Eswatini and South Africa. The city has a popul ...

Development

The airport was constructed by the Brazilian multi-national engineering and construction firm Odebrecht International, part of the

Odebrecht Odebrecht S.A. (), officially known as Novonor, is a Brazilian conglomerate, headquartered in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, consisting of diversified businesses in the fields of engineering, construction, chemicals and petrochemicals. The company w ...

conglomerate of companies, as part of rehabilitating the Nacala airport for commercial aviation use. As a cargo and passenger handling station the work was budgeted at USD 80 million. An agreement between the Mozambican and Brazilian governments was signed in April 2011 to provide funding for the airport rehabilitation as well as significant upgrades to infrastructure at the Beira Port. Both projects were funded by the

Brazilian Development Bank The National Bank for Economic and Social Development ( pt, Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social, abbreviated: BNDES) is a development bank structured as a federal public company associated with the Ministry of the Economy of Bra ...

, as part of a US$300 million investment in Mozambique by Brazil. The project consisted of the construction of passenger and cargo terminals, a control tower, maintenance building, firefighting building, runway, taxi ways, a parking lot and all necessary equipment and systems. It involved 23 months of construction work, with completion scheduled for March 2013. The final construction bill was thought to be between 125 and 200 million USD. The airport was designed to serve 500,000 people per year, receive 5,000 tons of cargo per year, making it the second-busiest in the country. Nacala's airport was inaugurated by Mozambique President

Armando Guebuza Armando Emílio Guebuza (born 20 January 1943) is a Mozambican politician who was the third President of Mozambique from 2005 to 2015. Career Guebuza, born at Murrupula in Nampula Province, joined the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) at t ...

in December 2014.

Scandal

Three years after opening it has been noted that the airport operates only at 4% capacity, serving only 20,000 passengers rather than the projected 500,000. Odebrecht, the company building the airport, admitted to bribing officials.

Facilities

The airport is at an

elevation The elevation of a geographic location is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface (see Geodetic datum § Vert ...

of above

mean sea level There are several kinds of mean in mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. ...

. It has one

runway According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a runway is a "defined rectangular area on a land aerodrome prepared for the landing and takeoff of aircraft". Runways may be a man-made surface (often asphalt concrete, as ...

designated 01/19 with an

asphalt Asphalt, also known as bitumen (, ), is a sticky, black, highly viscous liquid or semi-solid form of petroleum. It may be found in natural deposits or may be a refined product, and is classed as a pitch. Before the 20th century, the term a ...

surface measuring .

Airlines and destinations

References

External links

* {{authority control Airports in Mozambique Buildings and structures in Nampula Province