Departure
99%
vs 95% ▲ 3
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Cassidy International Airport serves the remote atoll of Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in the Line Islands of Kiribati, a lonely Pacific outpost with a single long runway inherited from its wartime past. For the simulator pilot it offers a genuine ocean-crossing destination, reached only after long overwater legs from Hawaii or Fiji, with basic AFIS radio cover and no instrument approach aids.
Cassidy International Airport lies on Kiritimati, the world's largest coral atoll, in the Line Islands group of Kiribati. It is a government-operated public airport and, historically, was the only airfield in the Kiribati portion of the Line Islands to carry an IATA or ICAO code. For a simulator pilot the appeal lies in its isolation: a single long hard runway sitting amid the atoll's lagoons, reached only by lengthy overwater flights from Hawaii or Fiji, with minimal ground infrastructure and no radar or instrument approach to lean on.
The airport is situated north of Banana, a settlement on Kiritimati island, in the Pacific Ocean roughly midway between Hawaii and Fiji. No specific controlled airspace class or FIR boundary detail is available in the sources reviewed.
Cassidy International has a single physical runway, 08/26, of hard surface construction measuring 6,899 feet in length. Both directions are lit, and the airport has no ILS.
An AFIS (Aerodrome Flight Information Service) is provided on 118.1 MHz, with a further AFIS frequency listed at 346 MHz. There is no ILS at the field.
During the Second World War the United States Army Air Forces Air Transport Command used the airfield as a refuelling stop on the Pacific transport route from Hawaii to Canton Island, supporting flights onward to Australia and New Zealand, and as a staging point for attacks on the Japanese-occupied Gilbert Islands. The airfield was expanded considerably during the war, and the original wartime runway layout, along with abandoned runways and aircraft parking areas, can still be traced in aerial photography today. The airport was originally named after Wilbur Layton Casady, a United States Army pilot whose aircraft crashed near the island on 23 March 1942; the name persisted, with a change in spelling to 'Cassidy' occurring at some point in the 1980s. In the postwar decades the field saw scheduled jet service from several carriers, including Air Tungaru's Boeing 727 flights to Honolulu, Tarawa and Papeete in the early 1980s, Aloha Airlines' Boeing 737 service to Honolulu from 1986, and Air Nauru's Boeing 737 operations to Honolulu, Tarawa and Nauru in the 1990s. In 2008 Air Pacific suspended flights to and from the airport after runway surface deterioration was judged unsafe by inspecting engineers, with charter flights filling the gap until scheduled services resumed in 2010.
The airport is currently served by Fiji Airways, operating between Nadi and Honolulu, and by Nauru Airlines flights to Tarawa on behalf of Air Kiribati, alongside Air Kiribati's own services to Tabuaeran and Teraina. No simulator scenery availability is noted in the sources reviewed.