Mariscal Sucre International Airport is an

international airport An international airport is an airport with customs and border control facilities enabling passengers to travel between countries. International airports are usually larger than domestic airports, and feature longer runways and have faciliti ...

serving

Quito Quito (; ), officially San Francisco de Quito, is the capital city, capital and second-largest city of Ecuador, with an estimated population of 2.8 million in its metropolitan area. It is also the capital of the province of Pichincha Province, P ...

Ecuador Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. It also includes the Galápagos Province which contain ...

. It is the busiest airport in Ecuador. It is located in the Tababela parish, about east of

, and because of its location it is also colloquially known as Tababela Airport. The airport currently serves as the main hub for Avianca Ecuador and the largest hub for

LATAM Ecuador Aerolane Líneas Aéreas Nacionales del Ecuador S.A. d/b/a LATAM Airlines Ecuador (formerly LAN Ecuador) is a subsidiary of LATAM Airlines Group, based in Quito, Ecuador. It is owned by Translloyd (55%) and LAN Airlines, LATAM Airlines (45%). H ...

. It also served as the main hub for

TAME Tame may refer to: *Taming, the act of training wild animals * River Tame, Greater Manchester *River Tame, West Midlands and the Tame Valley * Tame, Arauca, a Colombian town and municipality * "Tame" (song), a song by the Pixies from their 1989 a ...

, Ecuador's flag-carrier, before the airline was liquidated by the Ecuadorian government in 2020. The airport opened in February 2013 and replaced the 53-year old airport of the same name. The airport is named after independence leader

Antonio José de Sucre Antonio José de Sucre y Alcalá (; 3 February 1795 – 4 June 1830), known as the "Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho" (), was a Venezuelan general and politician who served as the president of Bolivia from 1825 to 1828. A close friend and associate ...

. It was the first 5-star airport in the

Western Hemisphere The Western Hemisphere is the half of the planet Earth that lies west of the Prime Meridian (which crosses Greenwich, London, United Kingdom) and east of the 180th meridian.- The other half is called the Eastern Hemisphere. Geopolitically, ...

as rated by

Skytrax Skytrax (originally known as Inflight Research Services) is a United Kingdom–based consultancy headquartered in London that runs an airline and airport review website. Services Skytrax conducts research for commercial airlines, as well as t ...

. The new Mariscal Sucre Int'l Airport covers 1,500

hectares The hectare (; SI symbol: ha) is a non-SI metric unit of area equal to a square with 100-metre sides (1 hm2), that is, square metres (), and is primarily used in the measurement of land. There are 100 hectares in one square kilometre. A ...

(3,707

acres The acre ( ) is a unit of land area used in the British imperial and the United States customary systems. It is traditionally defined as the area of one chain by one furlong (66 by 660 feet), which is exactly equal to 10 square chains, ...

) which is ten times larger than the airport it replaced.

Location

The new Quito International Airport is located on the Oyambaro plain near the town of Tababela, about east of Quito, Ecuador. The location was chosen in order to expand the capacity of the city's airport. The old airport posed enormous risks because it was located in the middle of a mountainous city with high wind currents. It could no longer be expanded to accommodate larger aircraft or increased air traffic, and had been the scene of numerous incidents and crashes during the latter years of its operation.Report
on the conditions of the current airport and the benefits of a new airport (

Inter-American Development Bank The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB or IADB) is an international development finance institution headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States of America. It serves as one of the leading sources of development financing for the countri ...

)

History

Construction began in 2006. A re-negotiation of the financing contract for the airport was signed on 9 August 2010. As part of final certification steps for the airport, Quito's mayor Augusto Barrera and around 100 other passengers left an early morning flight from nearby Mariscal Sucre International Airport on an

American Airlines American Airlines, Inc. is a major airlines of the United States, major airline in the United States headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, within the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, and is the Largest airlines in the world, largest airline in the ...

Boeing 757 The Boeing 757 is an American Narrow-body aircraft, narrow-body airliner designed and built by Boeing Commercial Airplanes. The then-named 7N7, a twinjet successor for the trijet Boeing 727, 727, received its first orders in August 1978. The ...

on July 2, 2012. The inaugural flight allowed officials to test the performance of check-in counters and other systems. The flight lasted nine minutes and the plane was met by a water cannon salute at the new airport. The official inauguration was postponed from October 2012, citing the progress of improvements to various access routes, the holiday season, and other factors. The new airport commenced operations on 20 February 2013 following the closure of the old airport the night before. The first flights scheduled to arrive at the new airport were TAME flight 302 from

Guayaquil Guayaquil (), officially Santiago de Guayaquil, is the largest city in Ecuador and also the nation's economic capital and main port. The city is the capital (political), capital of Guayas Province and the seat of Guayaquil Canton. The city is ...

(domestic), and

LAN Lan or LAN may refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in space * ...

flight 2590 from

Lima Lima ( ; ), founded in 1535 as the Ciudad de los Reyes (, Spanish for "City of Biblical Magi, Kings"), is the capital and largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón River, Chillón, Rímac River, Rímac and Lurín Rive ...

, Peru (international). Arrival times were scheduled for 9:00 and 9:30 a.m. respectively.

Airlines and destinations

Iberia airbus 340 600 madrid - quito route

Passenger

Notes: *:

KLM KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, or simply KLM (an abbreviation for their official name Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V. , ),

's flight from Quito to Amsterdam makes a stop in Guayaquil.

Cargo

Statistics

Annual traffic

Top destinations

Notes

References

External links

New Quito International Airport: Main Information
''Quiport Corporation''. Retrieved April 12, 2009.
Quito Airport Hotel

New Airport: A Door to Development
''Corpaq - Quito Airport Corporation''. Retrieved April 12, 2009. * * Wikivoyage: Tababela {{Airports in Ecuador Airports in Ecuador Transport in Quito Buildings and structures in Pichincha Province Airports established in 2013 2013 establishments in Ecuador