Fairbanks International Airport is a state-owned public-use airport located three miles (5 km) southwest of the central business district of Fairbanks, a city in the Fairbanks North Star Borough of the United States state of Alaska. It is located in the South Van Horn census-designated place. Fairbanks was the smallest city in the United States with regularly scheduled non-stop international flights, as Condor offered weekly flights to Frankfurt during the summer tourist season. Air North is now the only international airline to offer scheduled charters with flights (to Canada).

History

Early years

The airport opened in 1951 and took over existing scheduled airline traffic to Fairbanks, which had previously used Ladd Army Airfield. Alaska Airlines used Fairbanks as its main hub in the 1950s, with service to Seattle and Portland as well as intrastate service to Anchorage, Nome and other destinations. By 1967, however, the airline shifted its Alaska hub to Anchorage; its Anchorage-Fairbanks service continues to this day. In the mid-1970s, following the development of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Alaska Airlines and Braniff International offered "interchange service" between Fairbanks and Houston via Anchorage, Seattle and Dallas. In 1982, following airline deregulation, Alaska Airlines and American Airlines began a similar interchange service using Boeing 727s. Pan American World Airways had also served Fairbanks since 1932. The station was originally opened after the acquisition of Pacific International Airways and used for short-haul services to Juneau, Seattle, Ketchikan, Whitehorse and other destinations. Pan Am intended to use Fairbanks as a stop for service to Asia as early as 1931, but initial difficulty in negotiating landing rights with the Soviet Union, followed by the outbreak of World War II, delayed these plans until decades later. Pan Am service to Fairbanks continued through the opening of FAI until 1965, when the Civil Aeronautics Board terminated Pan Am's rights to serve Alaska. Pan American World Airways eventually used Fairbanks as a stopover for transpacific service from New York and Seattle to Tokyo starting in September 1969. In 1974, Pan Am agreed to transfer its Fairbanks-Seattle service to Western Airlines, and requested that the CAB allow its New York-Tokyo service to be suspended from April 1975. Other carriers such as Japan Airlines and Korean Air began to use Fairbanks as a technical stop for transpacific cargo flights in the late 1970s.

Development since the 2000s

Condor started a seasonal route to Frankfurt in May 2001. The inbound flight stopped in Whitehorse, Canada, and the outbound one was nonstop. On October 11, 2009, the airport completed a new terminal and began demolishing the old terminal which was built in 1948. The new terminal is built around the modern TSA standards. In addition to architectural design and better security, the main terminal now has six jet-bridges (up from the former five). The 2,700m2 of custom-unitized curtain wall was designed and supplied by Overgaard Ltd. Hong Kong. The special design incorporates double low-e triple glazing. The new building's footprint is smaller than the old building. For the 12-month period ending February 28, 2018, the airport had 119,898 aircraft operations, an average of 328 per day: 58% general aviation, 31% air taxi, 9% scheduled commercial, and 2% military. At that time there were 569 aircraft based at this airport: 91% single-engine, 8% multi-engine, <1% jet and <1% helicopter.

Facilities

Terminal

The terminal building, situated on the northwest side of the airport, contains eight gates: two for commuter carriers and six for larger carriers.

Runways

Fairbanks International Airport covers an area of 3,470 acres (1,404 ha) at an elevation of 439 feet (134 m) above mean sea level. It has four runways:

Airlines and destinations

Passenger

Cargo

Statistics

Airline market share

Annual traffic

Accidents and incidents