8.3 – The brasilia international airport – key to leverage brasilia as an international tourist destination

Inaugurated on May 3, 1957 with the first commercial Pan American flight to New York, the Brasilia International Airport is today the third largest airport in the country in terms of international passengers. To guarantee the increase in tourist flow, the Brasilia President Juscelino Kubitscheck International Airport has become a key piece in leveraging Brasilia as a tourist destination.

The airport has gone through several modifications: in 1994, it went through structural reforms; in 2012, six months before the Confederations Cup, a new expansion was begun, which allowed a historical record to be set on January 6, 2015 with 65 thousand passengers in one day; in March 2015, the air terminal was established to have the greatest capacity runway in the country – 60 flights per hour. It is the only airport in South America to simultaneously operate independent parallel runways. In 2017, it received a total of 17 million passengers, with almost 500 thousand being international passengers, but with a planned capacity of nearly 42 million passengers per year.