Departure
96%
vs 95% ▲ 1
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Aleppo International Airport (OSAP) is Syria's principal airport for its second city, a long-runway field east of the city centre with a history stretching back to the French Mandate period. It has been repeatedly closed and reopened through the years of civil war and cross-border air strikes, and its operational status remains unsettled, making it a field of considerable historical interest to the simulator pilot rather than a straightforward VFR destination.
Aleppo International Airport serves the city of Aleppo in northern Syria and is owned by the Syrian government, operated by the General Authority of Civil Aviation. It has historically functioned as a secondary hub for Syrian Air and for other Syrian and regional carriers. For the flight simulation pilot, its appeal lies less in routine operations and more in its long aviation pedigree, dating to the early days of international air travel, and in the dramatic events that have shaped it through decades of conflict.
The airport lies at coordinates 36.1805N, 37.2268E, at a field elevation of 1266 feet, on the outskirts of Aleppo in Aleppo Governorate, Syria. It sits within Syrian airspace and serves as the aerial gateway to the country's second city.
The airport has a single physical runway, 09/27, a hard-surfaced strip approximately 9528 feet long, lit for night operations. An instrument landing system serves runway 27.
Approach and tower services both operate on 119.1 MHz. An ILS is available on runway 27 for instrument approaches.
The airfield's origins date to the early twentieth century during the French Mandate over Syria. It gained early international significance in 1924, when KLM Royal Dutch Airlines routed its first flight from Amsterdam to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies through Aleppo. During the Second World War the field, then known as Aleppo-Nayrab, saw action during the Syrian campaign of 1941, when Australian troops fighting Vichy French forces captured French fighters and Morane-Saulnier MS.406s there. The airport was progressively upgraded over subsequent decades, with a new terminal inaugurated in 1999. The Syrian civil war brought repeated disruption: the airport closed in January 2013, reopened briefly in January 2014 for a single civilian flight carrying foreign journalists, and saw its first flight in four years only in January 2017 following the government's recapture of eastern Aleppo during the Battle of Aleppo. Scheduled civilian operations resumed on 19 February 2020 with a flight from Damascus, and services to Beirut and Erbil restarted in January 2021 after a pandemic-related pause. From 2022 the airport became a repeated target of Israeli air strikes, which damaged the runway and closed the field on several occasions, including strikes in September 2022, March, May, August and October 2023, and further attacks in 2024 near the adjacent military installations. On 30 November 2024 the Syrian Democratic Forces took control of the airport amid the wider offensive on Aleppo, before militants of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took over the site and captured a number of military aircraft there. Following the fall of the Assad government, the first commercial flight since the change of regime landed at the airport on 18 March 2025.
The airport's operator has stated that Aleppo International Airport is currently not operational, reflecting the unsettled situation following years of conflict damage and repeated closures. The terminal, completed in 1999 and refurbished with post-war assistance from Qatar, combines modern and traditional architectural styles and was designed with a capacity of around 1.7 million passengers a year, though actual operations have been intermittent. Prior permission is required for any flight planning to this aerodrome, and pilots should treat its status as unconfirmed pending further information.