Departure
97%
vs 95% ▲ 2
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Los Garzones Airport (SKMR/MTR) serves the city of Montería in Colombia's Córdoba Department, and is the only airport in the department able to handle modern jet aircraft up to Airbus A330 size. For a visiting VFR or IFR pilot it offers a single long, lit hard-surface runway equipped with ILS, set in low-lying terrain near the Sinú river basin.
Los Garzones Airport lies just outside Montería, in Los Garzones, and is operated by Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste. It is the principal gateway to the Córdoba Department, handling scheduled airline traffic from carriers such as Avianca, Clic, JetSmart Colombia and LATAM Colombia, and is notable for being the only airport in the department capable of accepting large jet aircraft. For a simulator pilot it is an interesting Colombian regional field combining a substantial single runway with a straightforward provincial airport environment.
The airport is located at Los Garzones, near Montería and Cereté in the Córdoba Department of Colombia, at coordinates 8.8229 N, 75.8252 W. Traffic in the surrounding area is served by Montería Flight Information Service.
Los Garzones has a single physical runway, 14/32, 6,248 feet long with a hard surface and lit for night operations. Runway 32 is equipped with an ILS approach, giving pilots an instrument option for arrivals from that direction; runway 14 is available for visual and circling approaches.
Pilots should expect to work Montería FIS on 127.5 MHz for flight information services in the surrounding airspace. Montería Radio operates on 348.8 MHz, and the tower frequency is 118.1 MHz for arrivals, departures and circuit traffic. Runway 32 is served by an ILS for instrument approaches.
Aviation reached Montería in the era of the Colombo-German air transport company Scadta, whose Junkers F-13 floatplanes operated from the Sinú River in the 1920s and 1930s; the airline was reorganised as Avianca in 1940 after its German pilots were dismissed. The city's first proper airfield, San Jerónimo de Montería, opened in 1937 and hosted Avianca's Douglas DC-3 services from 1939. The arrival of the larger Douglas DC-4, which needed a longer runway, prompted the opening of Berástegui Airport in the 1960s on land belonging to General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The present airport at Los Garzones was inaugurated in 1974 to allow modern jet aircraft to serve Córdoba. Two recorded incidents occurred here: on 15 May 1961 a Douglas C-47 overran the runway and struck barbed-wire fencing, with all sixteen occupants unharmed, and on 2 May 1990 a Grumman G-159 Gulfstream I ran off the runway end and caught fire, with all six occupants escaping safely. A further accident on 23 November 2016 saw the nose landing gear of a general aviation aircraft detach, causing significant underside damage, though both occupants exited without injury.
The airport is operated by Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste and serves as a hub for the airline Clic and a focus city for Avianca, with scheduled services also flown by JetSmart Colombia and LATAM Colombia to destinations including Bogotá, Medellín and Barranquilla. Between 2014 and 2017 the airport underwent renovation costing around 100 million US dollars, including an extension of the runway from 1,900 metres to 2,300 metres and an enlargement of the terminal, works that gave the field the capability to handle international flights and larger jet types.