Mataveri International Airport

Mataveri Airport sits on Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, roughly 3,700 kilometers west of the Chilean mainland. People often call it the most remote commercial airport in the world. A small landing strip was first built in the 1960s. In 1967 the Chilean airline LAN began flying there, ending the island's isolation and replacing the occasional supply ship that had been its only regular contact with the outside world.

In 1986 and 1987, NASA and the US Air Force paid to lengthen and strengthen the runway. The goal was to let it serve as an emergency abort landing site for the Space Shuttle if a mission went wrong. The work was controversial among islanders. It left Mataveri with a runway of about 3,300 meters, far longer than the island's own air traffic actually needs.

That length lets huge widebody jets land there, giving the island both a lifeline and a role as an emergency stop for planes crossing the South Pacific. Tourism then grew steadily until Chile capped visitor numbers by law in 2018. The island closed entirely to outsiders for more than two years during the pandemic. Flights today still remain the only practical way in or out.

Mataveri has a single runway, 10/28, about 3,300 meters long, extraordinarily long for an island with only a few thousand people. It exists mainly because of the old Space Shuttle backup program. The terminal is small and handles only a handful of flights each week. LATAM is the sole scheduled airline, flying Boeing 787 widebody jets from Santiago and sometimes continuing on to Papeete.

Because there is no other airport within reach, flights must carry extra fuel in case they cannot land. They also follow strict safety rules made for this route. If a plane must divert, it has to turn back to the mainland. Fuel, spare parts, and most supplies arrive either on the same aircraft or by ship.