Kamigotō Airport is a public aerodrome located on Kashiragashima Island (頭ヶ島), a smaller bridge-linked island just off the far east coast of Nakadorijima in the
Gotō Islands
The are Japanese islands in the Sea of Japan. They are part of Nagasaki Prefecture.
Geography
There are 140 islands, including five main ones: , , , , and . The northernmost island is Ukujima.
The group of islands runs approximately fr ...
,
Nagasaki Prefecture
is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan, mainly located on the island of Kyūshū, although it also includes a number of islands off Kyūshū's northwest coast - including Tsushima and Iki. Nagasaki Prefecture has a population of 1,246,4 ...
,
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
. The site is about northeast
of Kamigotō town office,
Shinkamigotō. The terminal was renovated in July 2015 and the airport remains active for emergency medical shuttles, but commercial passenger routes have been suspended for several years. Given the airport's lack of traffic and its unusually remote location, the runway has been used occasionally as a venue for 'dark sky' appreciation tours with tourists lying on the runway and staring at the cosmos above.
History
The airport opened in April 1981 (Showa 56) with a 800m long, 25m wide landing strip built along the entire north–south flattened top of Kashiragashima. Nagasaki Airways, rebranded after March 2001 as
Oriental Air Bridge
is a Japanese regional airline headquartered on the grounds of Nagasaki Airport in Ōmura, Nagasaki, Ōmura, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. It operates regional services to the islands within Nagasaki Prefecture and also operates domestic services ...
, operated small passenger planes to
Fukuoka Airport
— formerly known as Itazuke Air Base — is an international airport located east of Hakata Station in Hakata-ku, Fukuoka, Japan. The facility has two runways and covers 355 hectares (877 acres) of land.
Fukuoka Airport is the principal a ...
(until March 2004) and to
Nagasaki Airport
is an airport located off the coast of Ōmura, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. The airport was the first airport in the world to be built on the ocean, using an existing small island located in the center of Ōmura Bay, with land areas that were ...
(until March 2006). By this time, new fast ferry services, combined with a falling island populations and the ever unreliable weather conditions (strong winds often causing cancellations), led to the suspension of commercial passenger flights. The nearest active airport is
Gotō-Fukue Airport
, is a third class airport located southwest of Gotō, Nagasaki Prefecture, off the western coast of Kyūshū, Japan. The airport also serves the city of Fukue. It is also known as and, since 2014, also styled Gotō Tsubaki Airport (五島 ...
which continue to serve the Island.
2011 Nagasaki News article
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References
Airports in Nagasaki prefecture
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