Departure
98%
vs 95% ▲ 2
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Asmara International Airport is the principal gateway to Eritrea, serving the capital city of Asmara from a plateau field sited at over 7,600 feet above mean sea level. Built by Italian colonial authorities in the 1920s and expanded through the 1930s, it remains both a civil airport and an Eritrean Air Force base, and its high elevation and history make it a distinctive destination for the simulator pilot.
Asmara International Airport lies at Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and is the country's largest and busiest airport, serving as its only field with regularly scheduled international services. It shares its site with the Eritrean Air Force, giving it a dual civil and military character, and its unusually high field elevation of 7,635 feet makes it one of the more demanding high-altitude airports a simulator pilot is likely to encounter in the region.
The airport sits at Asmara in the Maekel Region of Eritrea, at coordinates 15.2842N, 38.9008E. It functions as the country's principal international aerodrome and doubles as an Eritrean Air Force base, giving the surrounding airspace a mixed civil-military character.
Asmara has two physical runways. The longer is 07/25, measuring 9,832 feet on a hard surface with lighting on both directions, and runway 07 is equipped with an ILS. The secondary runway is 12/30, 6,280 feet long, also hard-surfaced and lit in both directions.
Approach control is available on 120.7 MHz and the tower operates on 118.1 MHz. Runway 07 is served by an ILS, providing an instrument approach for arrivals into the high-elevation field.
The airport was built by Italian colonial authorities in 1922 as Aeroporto di Gura, the first such facility in Italian Eritrea, and initially served as the territory's main military airfield. In the mid-1930s it was enlarged and became the civilian Aeroporto Civile di Asmara-Umberto Maddalena. On 7 July 1935 an agreement with the British carrier Imperial Airways led to a regular Kassala-Khartoum-Asmara-Massawa commercial route flown by Ala Littoria's Caproni 133 aircraft, and that same year a further route linked Asmara with Assab and Mogadishu. In 1936 Ala Littoria launched the long-range Linea dell'Impero service connecting Mogadishu, Asmara, Khartoum, Tripoli and Rome, one of the earliest long-range air routes in the world. During the Second World War the airport was nearly destroyed by the British, before being renovated in the 1950s and reopened for flights to Addis Ababa and other Ethiopian cities. Following Eritrean independence in the 1990s it became the new nation's international air gateway. During the Eritrean-Ethiopian War it was bombed by Ethiopia in both 1998 and 2000. After runway improvements, Eritrean Airlines began regular services to Frankfurt, Milan, Nairobi and Rome in April 2003, and the airport handled 136,526 passengers in 2004. Lufthansa, long the principal foreign carrier at Asmara, suspended its Frankfurt service via Jeddah in October 2013 and ended the route entirely in 2014, reportedly owing to difficulty converting nakfa currency earnings. Flights from Addis Ababa resumed in 2018 following renewed Eritrea-Ethiopia relations, though in July 2024 Eritrea's Civil Aviation Authority ordered Ethiopian Airlines to suspend services by the end of September, citing persistent baggage handling and pricing grievances.
The airport continues to operate as Eritrea's principal international aerodrome, with capacity constrained by its small terminal, comparatively short runways for the altitude, and the field's high elevation of over 2,300 metres. It remains a dual-use facility, also serving as a base for the Eritrean Air Force. As of 2026 it maintained scheduled non-stop services to destinations including Cairo, Dubai, Jeddah, Port Sudan, Istanbul and Juba, with Abu Dhabi service due to begin in November 2026.
