El Hierro Airport

El Hierro Airport is an airport located 9km northeast of Valverde. It is the only existing airport on the Island of El Hierro, Spain. It was inaugurated on December 1972 and it, officially, it is called Aeropuerto de los Cangrejos.However, in spite of its size and its limited timetable, it was the airport which had the greatest increase in number of passengers and merchandise in the Canary Islands in 2007.The air traffic is national, and the flights are normally from/to Tenerife North and Gran Canaria. In 2011, the airport carried 170,225 passengers, with 4,674 operations and 135 tons of merchandise.HistoryThe first aeronautical event in the island was on December 12, 1955, and it was the first rescue operation by the SAR in the Canary Islands too. It consisted of an evacuation of an ill person who had to be transported to Tenerife in a helicopter.There was a real necessity of having an airport in the island, so in 1962 some studies to locate the best place for the future airport were started, but the orography of the island is very complex, and there were not too many places available for that aim.Finally, the engineers decided to place the airport in a place called "Llano de los Cangrejos" located in the northeast of the Island, near its capital, Valverde.Works to build the new installations began on 1967, building a runway (16-34), a small passenger terminal and an aircraft platform. Once the works were finished, on November 11, 1972, the airport was inaugurated and dedicated to national air traffic of passengers and merchandise. It was classified as an 2-C category (OACI) or airport of third category.The airplane which made the first landing in the island was a Do-27 of the Spanish Air Force, but the official inauguration was made by a DC-3 which carried the minister Julio Salvador y Días-Benjumena.