Baucau Airport guide

Baucau Airport sits on a plateau in the Baucau administrative post of eastern Timor-Leste, with the Wetar Strait to the north and a mountain range to the south. It is also known as Cakung Airport. The ICAO code is WPEC and the elevation is about 542 m.

The Portuguese colonial administration began building the field by hand in 1946, and it opened in May 1947 as the colony's main airfield. The runway was adapted for Boeing 707s in 1963. Transportes Aéreos de Timor flew from here to Darwin, and the last Darwin flight left on 7 August 1975. Indonesian paratroopers seized the airport that December.

The single asphalt runway, 14/32, is 2,509 m long. That is far longer than the runway at Dili and was built to take large airliners. The airport is unattended and mostly unused, with no air traffic control, fire fighting equipment or ground handling. Aero Dili has flown a Cessna 207 between Baucau and Dili, and Mission Aviation Fellowship uses it for occasional medevac flights. A United States funded rehabilitation, covering a security fence, an equipment warehouse and vehicles, began in January 2022.