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Kristianstad Österlen Airport (ESMK/KID) is a regional airport in Skåne County, southern Sweden, built on the former military airfield at Everöd just outside the city of Kristianstad. It offers a single long instrument runway, a tower frequency, and is home to the Swedish Maritime Administration's SAR Helicopter SOUTH, making it a field of interest to sim pilots flying VFR or IFR approaches in southern Sweden.
Kristianstad Österlen Airport, known by the ICAO code ESMK and IATA code KID, serves the city of Kristianstad in Skåne County, Sweden. It is operated by the municipally owned Kristianstad Airport AB and has a long history as a military airfield before its conversion to full civilian use. For a sim pilot, the airport offers a single instrument-equipped runway, a control tower, and the presence of search-and-rescue helicopter operations, giving it a mix of general aviation, scheduled, and emergency-service traffic.
The airport lies near the city of Kristianstad in Skåne County (Skåne län), in southern Sweden. It sits within Swedish airspace under the jurisdiction of the relevant Swedish air navigation authority, with the field acquired entirely from the Swedish Armed Forces in 1996, after which it became a fully civilian aerodrome.
Kristianstad has a single physical runway, 01/19, with a hard paved surface measuring 7,371 feet in length. The runway is lit and equipped with an ILS on runway 19, supporting instrument approaches in poor weather. Field elevation is 69 feet.
Air traffic services are provided on the tower frequency, callsign Kristianstad TWR, on 129.355 MHz. The airport has an ILS approach available for runway 19.
The airfield originated in the mid-1940s as a grass strip known as Everödsfältet, built for military purposes, and received a paved runway in 1953. The Swedish Air Force formally opened it for civilian traffic in 1960, with scheduled services beginning in April 1961 when Linjeflyg started flights to Stockholm Bromma. The airport gained its first international route in 1988 with Muk Air services to Copenhagen-Kastrup, followed by Air Lithuania flights to Kaunas and Palanga from 1992. Between 1995 and 1997 the airport underwent major upgrades, including widening, reinforcing and extending the runway and installing a new ILS system, enabling operations by heavier aircraft; the site was fully transferred from the Swedish Armed Forces to civilian ownership in 1996. Ryanair operated a London route between 1998 and 2001, and SAS flew to Stockholm-Arlanda for around a decade before withdrawing in 2002, after which Skyways and Malmö Aviation took over the route. Skyways went bankrupt in May 2012, leaving the airport temporarily without scheduled flights until Sparrow Aviation (originally Flyglinjen) resumed services in August 2012. In 2013 the airport was rebranded as Kristianstad Österlen Airport. The Swedish Maritime Administration's SAR Helicopter SOUTH began operating from a temporary base at the airport in 2018 and moved into a permanent base in 2022. The runway, designated 01/19, was resurfaced during the summer of 2023.
Kristianstad Österlen Airport continues to handle scheduled passenger flights, with BRA resuming operations on the Stockholm route in August 2023 following the earlier withdrawal of Skåneflyg. The airport is designated one of Sweden's emergency preparedness airports, able to open the airfield and control tower for emergency medical flights on short notice, and it serves as the permanent base for the Swedish Maritime Administration's SAR Helicopter SOUTH, which has operated on bio-jet fuel since March 2022. The airport is owned by Kristianstad Municipality together with Hässleholm, Bromölla and Östra Göinge Municipalities.
