Tenerife North Airport

Tenerife North Airport (IATA: TFN, ICAO: GCXO) is a Spanish airport network AENA located in Tenerife, in the municipality of San Cristobal de La Laguna. ICAO is in the category 4-E, while for the Spanish DGAC is a second-class airport. The airport is part of the joint use airfield in North Tenerife / Los Rodeos with the Air Base FAMET, Los Rodeos. Combined with the Tenerife South Airport, it assembles the biggest movement of passengers at 12,764,375 (AENA2 report) and low-cost airlines, with a total of 20.

The airport was created following the request of Lufthansa to link the island with Berlin via Seville. For this, the prime Cabildo gave some land on a plateau at the top of the municipality of La Laguna (an altitude of 600m above sea level), on land purchased by the Cabildo de Tenerife. Its first flight dates back to 1929.

For fifteen years, it received several flights, including the Royal Order of May 14th 1930. This approved its appointment for the domestic airport terminal being built (completed in 1943) until 3 May 1946, a ministerial order officially opened to traffic airport and a decree on July 12, qualifies it as a customs airport open to all kinds of domestic and international traffic.

The airport became the main gateway for tourists to Tenerife, and a vital place for communications on the island. The runway was expanded to the south on a dirt embankment. Los Rodeos in the seventies changed its name to Tenerife Airport, and it is still is known by that name.

On March 27, 1977 an accident occurred at the airport, which was trading above its means (due to the closure of the airport of Las Palmas) in adverse weather conditions (it was immersed in a dense fog). The accident was caused by a chain of human error. Therefore they accelerated work on the second airport on the island being built in the south.

After opening a year after the Tenerife South Airport, Tenerife Airport became the Tenerife North Airport and IATA became TFN. The accident and the subsequent opening of the airport in the south had a large impact in Los Rodeos, which lost the status of international airport (and therefore all international flights) and severely reduced the number of domestic flights, with the consequence that the passenger numbers dropped to fewer than 800,000.

The airport however managed to emerge through inter-island flights, especially with La Palma and Gran Canaria, since users of these lines, travelling mainly to the metropolitan area of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In 2003 the then Minister of Development, Francisco Alvarez Cascos, opened a new terminal. That same year international connections were retrieved when they launched flights to Caracas. In 2005 they opened a new module for the new terminal exclusively for inter-island flights, designed to expedite the shipment of these flights.

The Airport currently operates to island destinations, national, European and covering SBA Airlines. The most important destination is Madrid-Barajas with figures reaching over half a million passengers annually, followed by Barcelona, Seville, Bilbao, Malaga and Valencia.

This means half of operations, the other 50% of flights are connections with the rest of the islands. Until the cessation of operations in December 2006, Air Madrid pinned routes to Buenos Aires, Bogota, Quito and Santiago de Chile. In 2007, the airport handled a total of 4,125,034 passengers. Combined with Tenerife South Airport, it assembled the biggest movement of passengers with 12,764,375 and the low-cost airlines a total of 20.

At the Council of Ministers on 24th August 2007, it was agreed the urgent occupation of property and rights affected by the proposed extension of the apron east of Tenerife North airport, affecting a total of 22,582 meters square of the municipal San Cristobal de La Laguna, and including 18 farms. The aim of the dossier was to expand aircraft parking on the east to meet the need of airport parking positions (3 positions for aircraft type B 767) giving it access from the parallel taxiway.

The platform runs with hydraulic concrete slabs in an area of 24,000 m2 for parking aircraft and four areas of 3,900 m2, 2,500 m2, 3,800 m2 and 1,200 m2 for ground handling services, plus related services and access roads from the fuel area. The expansion had been planned since 2001, when it was published in the Official Gazette of the master plan of Tenerife North Airport.