Tiksi Airport guide

Tiksi Airport (ICAO UEST) lies in the Bulunsky District of the Sakha Republic, on the Arctic coast of the Laptev Sea. The airfield is about 7 km north of the village of Tiksi, at an elevation of 9 m, and keeps to UTC+9. It is a shared-use field: civil flights operate alongside Russian Ministry of Defence and FSB aviation.

The paved runway was built in 1958, with extra taxiways added in 1964 and widening in 1975. In Soviet times the airfield served as a dispersal base for strategic aviation, with a transport squadron based on site. Reconstruction ran from 1986 to 1995 but was slowed by underfunding. Civil operations stopped on 1 October 2012, and the airfield reopened in April 2013.

The single reinforced-concrete runway, 02/20, measures 3,000 m by 59 m. The passenger terminal was reconstructed in 2016. Scheduled civil service is by Polar Airlines to Yakutsk, flown as an An-24 to Ust-Kuiga with a Mi-8 helicopter onward. Passenger numbers have held between about 15,500 and 19,000 a year since 2014.