Axum Airport () , also known as Emperor Yohannes IV Airport, is a public

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

serving

Axum Axum, also spelled Aksum (), is a town in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia with a population of 66,900 residents (as of 2015). It is the site of the historic capital of the Aksumite Empire. Axum is located in the Central Zone of the Tigray Re ...

, a city in the northern

Tigray Region The Tigray Region (or simply Tigray; officially the Tigray National Regional State) is the northernmost Regions of Ethiopia, regional state in Ethiopia. The Tigray Region is the homeland of the Tigrayan, Irob people, Irob and Kunama people. I ...

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

. The name of the city and airport may also be

transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...

as ''Aksum''. The facility is located to the east of the city. The airport is named after

Yohannes IV Yohannes IV ( Tigrinya: ዮሓንስ ፬ይ ''Rabaiy Yōḥānnes''; horse name Abba Bezbiz also known as Kahśsai; born ''Lij'' Kahssai Mercha; 11 July 1837 – 10 March 1889) was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1871 to his death in 1889 at the ...

, the

Emperor of Ethiopia The emperor of Ethiopia (, "King of Kings"), also known as the Atse (, "emperor"), was the hereditary monarchy, hereditary ruler of the Ethiopian Empire, from at least the 13th century until the abolition of the monarchy in 1975. The emperor w ...

from 1872 to 1889. The airport was heavily damaged by

Tigray People's Liberation Front The Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF; ), also known as the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, is a left-wing Ethnic nationalism, ethnic nationalist, paramilitary group, and the former ruling party of Ethiopia. It was classified as a ter ...

forces during the Tigray conflict in November 2020.

Facilities

Axum Airport lies at an

elevation The elevation of a geographic location (geography), ''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 equipotenti ...

of above

mean sea level A mean is a quantity representing the "center" of a collection of numbers and is intermediate to the extreme values of the set of numbers. There are several kinds of means (or "measures of central tendency") in mathematics, especially in statist ...

. It has one runway designated 16/34, with an

asphalt concrete Asphalt concrete (commonly called asphalt, blacktop, or pavement in North America, and Tarmacadam, tarmac or bitumen macadam in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland) is a composite material commonly used to surface road surface, roads ...

surface measuring . It is capable of receiving very large aircraft, such as the Antonov 124, which brought the Axum Obelisk back from Italy in 2005.

Airlines and destinations

Incidents

On 2 May 1988, a Douglas C-47A ET-AGT of Ethiopian Airlines was destroyed on the ground in an attack on the airport by

Ethiopian Air Force The Ethiopian Air Force (ETAF) () is the air service branch of the Ethiopian National Defence Force. The ETAF is tasked with protecting the national air space, providing support to ground forces, as well as assisting civil operations during wa ...

MiG-23s during the

Ethiopian Civil War The Ethiopian Civil War was a civil war in Ethiopia and present-day Eritrea, fought between the Ethiopian military junta known as the Derg and Ethiopian-Eritrean anti-government rebels from 12 September 1974 to 28 May 1991. The Derg overthre ...

References

External links

* Airports in Ethiopia Tigray Region Buildings and structures in Axum {{Ethiopia-airport-stub