Pančevo Airport is an airport near the city of Pančevo

Pancevo

Pančevo is a city and municipality located in the southern part of Serbian province of Vojvodina, 15 km northeast from Belgrade. In 2002, the city had a total population of 77,087, while municipality of Pančevo had 127,162 inhabitants. It is the administrative center of the South Banat...

, Serbia

Serbia

Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

 near Belgrade

Belgrade

Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...

. The airport is mostly used for general aviation

General aviation

General aviation is one of the two categories of civil aviation. It refers to all flights other than military and scheduled airline and regular cargo flights, both private and commercial. General aviation flights range from gliders and powered parachutes to large, non-scheduled cargo jet flights...

 operations. It has a single grass runway 1,000 metres long and 60 metres wide.

The airport is also used by Utva Aviation Industry, a manufacturer of light sporting and training aircraft also located in Pančevo, for testing its aircraft.

History

On March 15, 1923, aircraft of the Franko-Rumen company started operations from Pančevo airport. A few days later on March 25, services between Paris and Istanbul via Pančevo commenced, the first international flights to or from Belgrade. On September 9 the same year, the first aircraft took off on a scheduled service from Belgrade to Bucharest. This was also the first commercial night flight in the history of aviation. Franko-Rumen decided that flying at night was the only way for its aircraft operating on the Paris-Belgrade-Bucharest-Istanbul service to beat the famous Orient Express

Orient Express

The Orient Express is the name of a long-distance passenger train service originally operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. It ran from 1883 to 2009 and is not to be confused with the Venice-Simplon Orient Express train service, which continues to run.The route and rolling stock...

train to Istanbul.

Franko-Rumen changed its name to SIDNA in 1925, which used Pančevo airport until May 1927.

External links

• Pančevo airport information (PDF)