Departure
95%
vs 95%
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Portland International Airport (KPDX) is a joint civil-military field on the south bank of the Columbia River in Multnomah County, six miles northeast of downtown Portland, Oregon. It is Oregon's busiest airport, a hub for Alaska Airlines, and shares its ramp with an Oregon Air National Guard fighter base, making it a genuinely interesting Class C destination for a simulator pilot to fly into.
Portland International Airport, known to controllers and pilots simply as PDX, is the largest airport in Oregon and the primary gateway for the Portland metropolitan area. It is operated by the Port of Portland and sits on the south bank of the Columbia River, combining a busy civil airline operation with a resident Oregon Air National Guard fighter wing. For a simulator pilot the appeal lies in its scale and mix of traffic: a large hub airport with parallel heavy-duty runways, a crosswind strip, an Air Guard flightline, and general aviation handling, all inside a highly structured Class C environment.
PDX lies within Portland's city limits, about six miles by air (roughly twelve by road) northeast of downtown Portland, bordered to the north by the Columbia River and historically by the Columbia Slough to the south. The field is surrounded by Class C controlled airspace reflecting its status as a major hub with scheduled international and domestic airline service, and it is a joint-use facility shared with the Oregon Air National Guard, whose base occupies the southwest portion of the airport property and is home to the 142nd Wing flying the F-15EX Eagle II.
PDX has three physical runway pairs. The main parallel runway, 10R/28L, is a hard-surfaced, lit runway approximately 10,985 to 10,986 feet long with instrument landing systems serving both ends. Its parallel companion, 10L/28R, is also a hard-surfaced, lit runway with an ILS, with recorded lengths of 8,527 feet (runway 10L) and 9,279 feet (runway 28R). A shorter crosswind runway, 03/21, is 5,996 feet long, hard-surfaced and lit, with an ILS on the runway 21 end. Field elevation is 23 feet.
PDX Approach is worked on 118.1 MHz and 129.92 MHz, with Departure also on 118.1 MHz. The ATIS broadcasts on 120.625 MHz, and Clearance Delivery is on 120.125 MHz. Ground is on 121.9 MHz and Tower on 118.7 MHz. UNICOM is available on 122.95 MHz. The Oregon Air National Guard base on the field uses its own Base Operations frequency, 128.05 MHz, and a command post frequency, ACP 124.35 MHz, for the 939th Air Refueling Wing. Both parallel runways (10R/28L and 10L/28R) and runway 21 are equipped with an ILS.
As a Class C, tower-controlled hub airport, arriving and departing traffic at PDX operates under full air traffic control rather than an uncontrolled circuit pattern; pilots should expect to establish two-way radio contact with Approach or Tower before entering the surrounding controlled airspace and to follow ATC sequencing for the parallel runways and the crosswind strip.
The airport sits immediately south of the Columbia River, with Marine Drive running along its northern boundary and Interstate 205 passing nearby, connecting the field to downtown Portland to the southwest and to suburbs north into Washington state. These features, along with the river itself, provide useful visual cues for pilots orienting themselves toward the field.
Portland's original airport was the small Swan Island Municipal Airport on the Willamette River, dedicated by Charles Lindbergh in 1927, but by the mid-1930s it was already considered too small and unable to be expanded for larger aircraft. The Portland City Council purchased the present site, bordered by the Columbia River to the north and the Columbia Slough to the south, in 1936, and development proceeded as a Depression-era Works Progress Administration project that employed over a thousand men to raise and drain the flood-prone ground with more than four million cubic yards of sand and a system of dikes. Two runways were operational by 1941 and the field opened officially on October 13, 1940, as Portland-Columbia Airport, distinguishing it from Swan Island. During the Second World War the airfield was used by the United States Army Air Forces, and its wartime layout included five runways arranged in an asterisk pattern with a terminal on the north side off Marine Drive. In 1948 the entire airport was flooded during the Vanport Flood, forcing airline services to divert to Troutdale Airport for several months. A new terminal and a longer 8,800-foot east-west runway were built in 1952, and construction of a second parallel east-west runway to the north created a midfield terminal layout; at that point all but the northeast-southwest runway of the original asterisk configuration were abandoned as taxiways, with that remaining runway extended to serve as the crosswind strip that survives today as runway 03/21. The airport's designation was updated to include "International" following these 1950s improvements, and its first international nonstop service began with a Western Airlines Boeing 720B flight to Vancouver, British Columbia.
PDX today functions as a joint civil-military airport, hosting scheduled airline operations alongside the Oregon Air National Guard's 142nd Wing, which flies the F-15EX Eagle II from a base on the airport's southwest side. General aviation handling at the field is provided by Atlantic Aviation.