San Pedro to Construct Bigger Airstrip for Bigger Planes  

The tourism season has just entered its peak season and the number of flights arriving in San Pedro from the Philip Goldson International Airport with visitors at this time has flooded air traffic at the island’s only airstrip. So now that tourism is expected to blossom in the coming months and years ahead, there is a plan to construct a second airstrip on the other side of the caye that will be able to accommodate bigger domestic planes and at the same time, offer an ease to the air traffic congestion at the current airstrip. Area Representative for Belize Rural South, Andre Perez shared the plan with us.

Andre Perez

Andre Perez, Area Representative, Belize Rural South

“The San Pedro airstrip is already congested. The flights coming out of the P.G.I.A. to San Pedro are fast becoming crunch time. If you go this it’s going to mark the beginning of the tourist season and lots of more flights from P.G.I.A. to San Pedro. Out of every one hundred passengers that arrive at P.G.I.A., eight of them come to either Caye Caulker or San Pedro via flights. So that says that we have to make some plans. We cannot extend the runway anymore here at the San Pedro airstrip so what we’re looking at right now is the possibility of expanding or making a bigger airstrip up north, not the Basil Jones area, closer. We’re looking at a place to maybe build an eight-thousand-foot runway that would be able to take over bigger planes that will take thirty passengers. The reality is this: the Cessna aircrafts take fourteen passengers. Whenever you have five airlines arriving there with almost eight hundred passengers, how do you mobilize all of these smaller Cessna airplanes with fourteen flights. It doesn’t make any sense economically, so we are looking into – the only way to do that if they’re coming to Ambergris Caye, is opening up a runway up north.”