An eventual year at Kittilä airport

From a fire to a record-breaking Christmas

“Everything seemed to be going well until a fire broke out in July,” says Kittilä’s airport manager Kari Tohmo of his reminiscences of the year’s dramatic turn of events.

The fire destroyed almost two-thirds of the older section of the airport: the area in the airport building that was renovated in 2005–2006. Air traffic at Kittilä came to a standstill for three days. The area for departures that was damaged in the fire was quickly repaired and taken into use again at the end of September. The temporary premises built to replace the section that was destroyed were completed in November; the construction of the new permanent building will start in spring 2007.

The blessing in disguise was that the fire did not affect the extension work at the airport that had already started. Kittilä Airport has been built in stages to meet the needs of increasing passenger traffic, and the extension completed in November 2006 was the seventh in the history of the airport. It added around 2,000 square metres of additional space for services at the airport.

The airport’s new section contains the concourse for arriving passengers, the baggage carousels and an area for customs and for baggage handling. Passengers are also served by a cafeteria and car rental companies in the new building.

A record number of international passengers passed through the extended airport in December: 68,800. The growth compared with the same period in the preceding year was 37 per cent.

Airport Manager Kari Tohmo was able to heave a sigh of relief at the end of the year. The airport was able to serve the Christmas traffic even more efficiently than in the previous year and the tourist entrepreneurs in the area did not lose any customers.

“There was no time for hanging around though, because it was possible for as many as 8,000 passengers a day to pass through the airport. We managed to get through it thanks to the flexibility of the staff .”

Kittilä and Rovaniemi were once again the most popular airports for Christmas traffic in northern Finland. Most of the Christmas visitors at Kittilä were Brits, but Russians came for New Year. There was also a large number of charter flights from Switzerland and France.