Departure
96%
vs 95% ▲ 1
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport, Estonia's principal international gateway, sits on the eastern shore of Lake Ülemiste just southeast of the capital's centre. A single long, lit hard runway with ILS on both ends makes it a straightforward but busy destination for simulator pilots flying airliner or GA traffic into a major Baltic hub.
Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport (ICAO: EETN, IATA: TLL) is the largest international airport in Estonia, serving the capital Tallinn. Owned and operated by AS Tallinna Lennujaam, it opened in 1936 and was renamed in 2009 to honour former Estonian president Lennart Meri. For a simulator pilot it offers a compact but capacious single-runway hub, close to the historic old town of Tallinn, with a long paved runway equipped for instrument approaches from both directions.
The airport lies on the eastern shore of Lake Ülemiste, about 2.7 nautical miles (5 km) southeast of Tallinn city centre. It sits within Estonian airspace and is served by its own approach and tower control, with Tallinn Radar providing approach service and Tallinn Tower handling the aerodrome itself.
The airfield has a single physical runway, 08/26, a hard-surfaced strip roughly 11,300 to 11,400 feet in length (recorded as 10,572 ft on runway 08 and 11,336 ft on runway 26). Both runway ends are lit and equipped with ILS, and the surface is suitable for wide-bodied aircraft.
Pilots should expect to work Tallinn Radar on APP frequency 127.905 MHz, monitor Tallinn ATIS on 124.88 MHz, and contact Tallinn Tower on 135.905 MHz. Both runway ends, 08 and 26, are served by ILS approaches.
The airport's position on the eastern shore of Lake Ülemiste is a prominent visual feature for pilots approaching from the city side, with the lake itself forming a clear landmark just to the northwest of the runway.
The site began development in the early 1930s after earlier Tallinn air services had operated from Lasnamäe Airfield and, briefly, from Nehatu. A seaplane harbour was built on Lake Ülemiste in 1928 to 1929 to serve Finnish seaplanes, and construction of the landplane airport began on 16 November 1931, with the first test landing flown by Captain Reissar in an Estonian Air Force Avro 594 Avian. The airport opened officially on 20 September 1936, though it had handled traffic before that date, including LOT Polish Airlines services that began in 1932 from Lasnamäe before relocating to the new field. The original runways were laid out as a triangle of short concrete strips allowing takeoffs and landings in six directions, the first concrete-paved runways in Estonia. Before the Second World War the airport had scheduled links to destinations abroad via Aerotransport, Deutsche Luft Hansa, LOT and the Finnish carrier Aero, including a Helsinki-Tallinn-Warsaw-Jerusalem service inaugurated in April 1937. Passenger and cargo traffic grew steadily through the 1930s, and a new terminal was under design when Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. The airport was renamed Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport in 2009 in memory of the former president, who died in 2006.
Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport remains Estonia's principal international airport, serving as a hub for airBaltic, Airest and Nyx Air. It has six taxiways and seventeen terminal gates, and the runway is long and wide enough to accommodate wide-bodied aircraft such as the Boeing 747.
