Tancredo Neves International Airport

Belo Horizonte - Tancredo Neves/Confins International Airport, formerly called Confins International Airport, is the main airport serving Belo Horizonte and Metropolitan Area, Brazil, located in the adjoining municipality of Confins. Since 2 September 1986 the airport is named after Tancredo de Almeida Neves (1910–1985), President-elect of Brazil. It is operated by BH Airport S.A..HistoryThe airport was built by Infraero and inaugurated in 1984. Its purpose was to lessen the congestion at Pampulha Airport, which at the time was operating at 120% of its capacity of 1.3 million passengers per year. It was expected that by 1990, passenger movement at Confins would be nearly 2 million passengers per year. However, it surpassed the 1 million passenger mark only 22 years later. Presently its maximum operational capacity is 13 million passengers per year.After its inauguration, just a small fraction of the capacity of Confins was used. This was partly due to its distance from downtown Belo Horizonte and, until recently, to the lack of satisfactory transportation alternatives for the pricey (about USD40) taxi rides. The over-crowded Pampulha Airport remained the airport of choice.In order to revert this scenario, in March 2005 the government of the state of Minas Gerais with the support of agencies of the Federal government decided to restrict Pampulha to operations of aircraft with capacity of up to 50 passengers. In the months thereafter, most operations were forced to move to Confins and the airport gained a new momentum. At that time, 130 flights were transferred from Pampulha to Confins, increasing annual passenger flow from 350,000 to around 3.0 million that year.