Corvera airport ready for December take-off as Aena signs official contract

The president of Aena said that the airport would be ready to open before the end of the year

On Saturday morning the president of AENA, Jaime García-Legaz and the president of the Region of Murcia, Fernando López Miras, signed the official contract granting Aena the concession to operate Murcia’s new international airport for the next 25 years, the regional president giving a symbolic set of keys to the incoming airport operator which already handles the most passengers of any operator worldwide.

García-Legaz confirmed that the intention of Aena is that the airport should be named “Juan de la Cierva” after the inventor of the Autogyro, Murcian born Juan de la Cierva y Codorniú, who pioneered the first flight of the C4 Autogyro on 9th January 1923, and that the operator was pursuing the various bureaucratic procedures which were required in order to legally register this as the chosen name of the airport.

Now that the contract has been legally signed and witnessed, Aena can begin work to complete the various processes which will grant it the licences to operate the airport, complete all of the safety evaluations, and legal documentation which must be undertaken in order for the airport to begin operations.

García-Legaz said that the airport would be ready to open from December, although was unable to give any firm indication of an exact date or confirm when commercial flights would begin. This, he said, depended entirely on the companies who would be operating from the airport, although maintained that operations would begin very quickly once the airport was ready to open.

During the period of “several months” which would be necessary to complete all of the bureaucratic processes to open the airport, the company would be working with the airlines to negotiate a schedule and routes and talking to businesses interested in working within the airport complex.

He insisted that there would be no delays regarding the transfer of operations between San Javier airport and the new airport at Corvera, “San Javier will close one day and Corvera open the next”, he said.

The transition between the two airports is being handled by Mariano Menor, current director of San Javier airport, who is also working to oversee the transfer of services and personnel between the two airports.

The current staffing is being maintained, with all personnel transferring to the new airport, and García-Legaz was keen to transmit a message of confidence to all of the suppliers and auxiliaries who will be opening businesses at the airport, maintaining the determination of Aena to run a “top level” airport at Corvera, which would be “in the same league” as Alicante airport, his staff working “with full intensity” to ensure that the maximum number of flights and passengers possible would be processed by the airport.

New jobs will be created by the transfer to the airport as the installations are noticeably larger and the airport will be able to operate for longer hours once the limitations of shared military use are removed.
Regional president Fernando López Miras said that on this day “words become facts” and that “today, as occurred with the autogiro 95 years ago, the Region of Murcia is taking off towards the future.”

The opening of the new airport is being viewed as a key to the economical and touristic development of the Murcia Region and has the capacity to handle four million passengers a year, its performance directly related to the creation of employment within the region.

For every million passengers who travel through the airport, 4,000 jobs will be created in businesses and services who service the volume of visitors arriving in the region and the increased capacity of the new airport provides a more viable platform on which to increase the number of routes and flights available to passengers.

“This is a motor of growth for the economy of the region, “he said and would create opportunities and solid jobs.

Also present at the ceremony were two former regional ministers for infrastructure, José Ballesta, now Mayor of Murcia City and Francisco Bernabé, now Government Delegate to the Region of Murcia, along with pedanía Mayors from the municipality of Murcia and representatives of the principal business associations of the Murcia Region.

Now that the official contract has been signed, work can also begin to prepare the network of auxiliary services which will support the opening of a new airport, and establish the support mechanisms to handle incoming passengers and all their logistical requirements.

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