Nacala International Airport
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Nacala Airport is an
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 ...
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 a ...
, in
Nampula Province Nampula is a Provinces of Mozambique, 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 Port ...
in
Mozambique Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique, is a country located in Southeast Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west, and Eswatini and South Afr ...
. 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 (), is the flag carrier of Mozambique. The airline was established by the Portuguese c ...
flying there twice a week from
Maputo Maputo () 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 population of 1,088,449 (as of 2017) distributed ov ...
.


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 or NBESD (, abbreviated: BNDES) is a development bank structured as a federal public company associated with the Ministry of the Economy of Brazil. The stated goal is to provide long-term fi ...
, 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 Mozambique, 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 (FRE ...
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 (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 In aviation, a runway is an elongated, rectangular surface designed for the landing and takeoff of an aircraft. Runways may be a human-made surface (often asphalt concrete, asphalt, concrete, or a mixture of both) or a natural surface (sod, ...
designated 01/19 with an
asphalt Asphalt most often refers to: * Bitumen, also known as "liquid asphalt cement" or simply "asphalt", a viscous form of petroleum mainly used as a binder in asphalt concrete * Asphalt concrete, a mixture of bitumen with coarse and fine aggregates, u ...
surface measuring .


Airlines and destinations


References


External links

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