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Daniel Z. Romualdez Airport (RPVA/TAC) serves Tacloban City in Leyte, Eastern Visayas, and is the principal gateway to the Eastern Visayas region from Manila and Cebu. It offers a single long asphalt runway and a straightforward VFR/IFR approach environment for a medium domestic airport, with a history stretching back to Allied airfield construction during the Pacific War.
Daniel Z. Romualdez Airport lies on the outskirts of Tacloban City on the island of Leyte, in the Eastern Visayas region of the Philippines. Operated by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, it is classified as a Class 1 principal domestic airport and is the main air gateway to Eastern Visayas from Manila and Cebu. For a visiting sim pilot it offers a single generous runway, a compact terminal environment, and a genuinely dramatic backstory tied to both the Second World War and the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.
The airport sits close to Tacloban City itself, on the eastern side of Leyte island facing the San Juanico Strait area, and serves as the principal aerodrome for the wider Eastern Visayas region. It is a controlled aerodrome with its own approach and tower services (detailed below), positioned within the airspace structure serving Leyte and the surrounding islands.
The airport has a single physical runway aligned 18/36, measuring 7,046 feet in length with a hard (asphalt) surface, and lit for night operations. There is no ILS available. Field elevation is 10 feet above mean sea level.
Pilots should expect to work Tacloban Approach on 120.8 MHz and Tacloban Tower on 122.1 MHz for arrival, departure and circuit traffic.
The airfield originated during the Second World War as the San Jose Airstrip, named for the village where it was built, and was constructed as an airstrip for the US Air Force together with a seaplane base for the US Navy, built by Seabees of the 88th Naval Construction Battalion at the Leyte-Samar Naval Base. Numerous USAAF units operated from the field in the final months of the Pacific campaign, including the 43d Bombardment Wing, the 345th and 417th Bombardment Groups, the 49th and 348th Fighter Groups, and the 421st and 547th Night Fighter Squadrons, all active between late 1944 and early 1945. After the war the field was converted for civil use and became popularly known as Tacloban National Airport, before later being renamed in honour of Daniel Z. Romualdez, a Leyte representative who served as the tenth speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives and was an uncle of Imelda Romualdez Marcos. On 7-8 November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan struck Tacloban and the Eastern Visayas region with winds averaging around 314 km/h and a four-metre storm surge, effectively destroying the airport: the terminal and control tower were demolished and the field was rendered unusable. It reopened to turboprop traffic on 11 November 2013 and to A320 jet operations by 14 November. On 17 January 2015, Pope Francis celebrated an open-air Mass on the airport apron attended by nearly half a million pilgrims, commemorating the devastation wrought by the typhoon.
The airport today functions as the principal domestic gateway for Eastern Visayas, handling significant passenger traffic through a single-level terminal building that has undergone expansion works, including a 2018 enlargement of the passenger terminal. A 1997 JICA study identified the field as a candidate for expansion, and further development work, including plans to extend the runway from 2,100 to 2,500 metres, has been undertaken with a view to enabling international flight operations.
