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Mataveri International Airport
Mataveri International Airport or Isla de Pascua Airport is located at Hanga Roa on Rapa nui (Easter Island) (Isla de Pascua in Spanish). It is from Santiago, Chile (SCL) which has scheduled flights to it on the Chilean carrier LAN Airlines (formerly LanChile), and from Mangareva (GMR) in the Gambier Islands. The runway starts just inland from the islands North West coast at Mataveri and nearly reaches the South Coast, almost separating the mountain of Rano Kau from the rest of the island.
The airport is the main point of entry for thousands of tourists who come to Easter Island to see its famous Moai and other archaeological sites. The airport contains a restaurant/bar, several souvenir shops, as well as a baggage claim area where most of the island's hotels and guesthouses have kiosks. The airport also has a transit lounge used by passengers who are continuing on to or from Papeete, Tahiti, which is also serviced by LAN Airlines.
Airlines and destinations
LAN Airlines
History
Scheduled services from Chile started in 1967 with a monthly DC-6B flight that took 9 hours, using a runway extended and tarmaced for the use of a US base. In 1970 services were upgraded with a much quicker weekly Boeing 707 service to Chile. Tahiti services were added in 1971 and the frequency doubled to twice weekly. .
The airport's single runway is 3,318 m . The airport was once designated as an abort site for the U.S. Space Shuttle when polar orbital flights from Vandenberg, California were planned, and the runway is long enough to accommodate a shuttle in an emergency landing. The project to lengthen the runway started in 1984 and enabled wide bodied jets to use the airport, which further boosted tourism to the island.
See also
Extreme points of the world
Shuttle Down, a 1980 novel by American author G. Harry Stine (Lee Correy), which gives a fictional account of the Space Shuttle Atlantis making an emergency landing.
External links
Live camera at airport (click on I. Pascua)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Mataveri International Airport
