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Iwami Airport, also known as Hagi-Iwami Airport, serves Masuda in Shimane Prefecture on the western coast of Honshu, Japan. It is a small regional field built around a single instrumented runway, offering a couple of daily airline round trips to Tokyo Haneda, and is otherwise a quiet destination of interest to a visiting VFR or IFR pilot for its coastal Chugoku setting.
Iwami Airport is a government-operated public airport serving the city of Masuda in Shimane Prefecture, on the western side of Honshu. Because of its proximity to the city of Hagi across the prefectural border in Yamaguchi, it is also marketed as Hagi-Iwami Airport. It is a modest regional field, built around a single paved runway with an ILS, handling a small number of scheduled airline flights each day, which makes it an interesting, low-traffic waypoint for a simulator pilot exploring the Chugoku region of Japan.
The airport lies near Masuda in Shimane Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan side of western Honshu, roughly 2.8 nautical miles from the old town of Iwami that gives the field its name. It also sits close enough to the city of Hagi, just across the border in Yamaguchi Prefecture, that the airport is commonly branded Hagi-Iwami Airport.
Iwami Airport has a single physical runway, 11/29, measuring 6,521 feet with a hard surface and runway lighting. The 11 direction is equipped with an ILS, giving instrument approach capability for arrivals from that direction.
The airport's published radio frequency is RDO 118.55 MHz. An ILS is available on runway 11 for instrument approaches.
Iwami Airport opened in July 1993 with scheduled services to Tokyo Haneda and Osaka Itami. In its early years the airport struggled with weak passenger demand despite local subsidies and reduced landing fees intended to encourage airline use. The Iwami-Haneda route saw a record number of passengers in 2013, a boost linked to the opening of Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni for civilian passenger flights, which allowed tour operators to package Iwami and Iwakuni together as gateways to regional attractions such as Izumo-taisha and Itsukushima Shrine. The airport's IATA code, IWJ, was originally assigned to Iwakuni when that airfield operated international flights between 1952 and 1964, before being reused for Iwami.
Iwami Airport currently supports two daily round-trip flights operated by All Nippon Airways to Tokyo Haneda, with a seasonal daily round trip to Osaka Itami operating for about a month in late summer. The airport also hosts two annual community events that make unusual use of the runway: the Inaka Ride cycling event in late summer, whose course includes a stretch on the runway, and the Hagi-Iwami Airport Marathon in late autumn, which starts near the airport gateway and also uses the runway for part of its course. Scheduled flights are not interrupted for either event.
