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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). The most remote airport in the world, Mataveri International Airport 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 island's southeast coast at Mataveri and nearly reaches the northwest 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 statues. 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.
History
Scheduled services from the Chilean mainland started in 1967 with a monthly DC-6B flight that took 9 hours, using a runway extended and paved for the use of a US base. In 1970, services were upgraded with a faster weekly Boeing 707 service to the mainland. 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. The project to lengthen the runway began in 1984 (ended in 1987) and enabled wide-bodied jets to use the airport, which further boosted tourism to the island. LAN currently flies Boeing 767 aircraft to the island on its scheduled services.
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
A-Z World Airports
Island heritage photos
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
