Departure
99%
vs 95% ▲ 4
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Rodríguez Ballón International Airport serves Arequipa, Peru's second-largest city, sitting high in the Andes at over 8,300 feet elevation beneath the slopes of El Misti volcano. It is one of southern Peru's principal air hubs, handling domestic services to Lima and Cusco and acting as a gateway for travellers heading to the Colca Canyon, making it a striking high-altitude destination for the VFR simulator pilot.
Rodríguez Ballón International Airport is the main airport serving Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, and together with Cusco's Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport forms one of the two principal air hubs of southern Peru. Named after the early Peruvian aviator Alfredo Rodríguez Ballón, the field is operated by the concessionaire Aeropuertos Andinos del Perú under owner CORPAC. For the simulator pilot it offers a demanding high-altitude approach in an Andean setting, with the snow-capped El Misti volcano dominating the skyline near the field.
The airport lies at Arequipa, in the Arequipa Region of southern Peru, at a field elevation of 8,333 feet, making it one of the higher commercial airports in South America. The terminal area sits close to the Cerro Colorado district on the edge of the city, with the El Misti volcano a prominent landmark nearby that pilots use both for orientation and to appreciate the terrain surrounding the approach and departure paths.
The airport has a single physical runway, 10/28, aligned east-west. Runway 10 is 9,763 feet long with a hard surface, is lit and is equipped with an ILS for instrument approaches. The reciprocal, Runway 28, is 8,328 feet long, also hard-surfaced and lit, but without an ILS.
Air traffic services are provided under the callsign Arequipa. Approach control, Arequipa APP, operates on 118.7 MHz, the same frequency shared with the tower, Arequipa TWR. Ground movements are handled on 121.9 MHz. Runway 10 is served by an ILS, giving instrument-approach capability into the field despite its high elevation and surrounding mountainous terrain.
The most conspicuous visual reference for pilots approaching Arequipa is the snow-capped El Misti volcano, which rises close to the city and airport and provides an unmistakable landmark for orientation on approach. The airport itself sits within the Cerro Colorado area on the outskirts of Arequipa, allowing the built-up area of the city to serve as a secondary reference when joining from the east.
Rodríguez Ballón International Airport opened on 15 August 1979 and was named for Alfredo Rodríguez Ballón, a Peruvian aviator celebrated for his 1932 crossing of the Andes from Mendoza, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile; he was later killed in a plane crash during the Colombia-Peru War. The airport rapidly grew to become one of Peru's busiest, at times even surpassing Cusco's airport in traffic, having been built with a planned capacity of 500,000 passengers a year. It was long dominated by now-defunct Peruvian carriers such as Aeroperú, Faucett Perú and Nuevo Continente, which operated international routes to Bolivia and Chile before their bankruptcies in the 1990s and 2000s left foreign-owned airlines such as LATAM to take over the market. The airport's history includes two notable accidents: in March 1983 a Peruvian Air Force Douglas C-47 was damaged beyond repair after an accident at the field, and in 1996 Faucett Perú Flight 251, approaching from Lima en route to Tacna, crashed while attempting to land in a thunderstorm with the runway obscured, killing all 123 people aboard in what remains the deadliest aviation accident in Peruvian history. The airport was granted in concession to Aeropuertos Andinos del Perú in 2011, by which time passenger numbers had already outstripped the terminal's planned capacity, prompting a programme of modernisation including new jet bridges completed in 2013.
The airport today handles domestic flights connecting Arequipa with Lima and Cusco, along with onward international connections via Lima to Guayaquil and Cartagena. It serves as a secondary base for JetSmart Perú and a focus city for LATAM Perú, with Sky Airline also operating services. Passenger traffic has grown steadily for decades, prompting a further expansion and modernisation programme announced in 2023 with a planned investment aimed at raising terminal capacity to two million passengers annually, with a new terminal targeted for completion in 2026.