Santos Dumont Airport (IATA: SDU, ICAO: SBRJ) is a domestic airport in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, one of the ten busiest in Brazil. It has a privileged location and is easily accessible right in the financial center of the city. Built in the 1930s on a landfill on the edge of Guanabara Bay, Santos Dumont was the first exclusively civilian airport to be opened in Brazil. Currently, it is the second busiest airport in the state of Rio de Janeiro after Galeão International Airport and the seventh busiest in Brazil, in 2014.
A highlight of the Santos Dumont Airport is the modern departure lounge, the first in Brazil totally covered with transparent material, which gives a wide view of the Guanabara Bay, where it is possible to observe sights such as the Rio-Niterói Bridge, the Fiscal Island , the Museum of Contemporary Art, the city of Niterói, the Naval School and the Pão de Açúcar.
The main activity of the airport is on the Rio-São Paulo bridge, which transports passengers between Santos Dumont and Congonhas Airport in São Paulo, handling approximately 4 million passengers per year, which represents almost half of all the movement of the airport. airport. The second and third busiest routes are respectively to Brasília International Airport and Belo Horizonte-Confins International Airport, both of which carry more than 1 million passengers a year.
The airport complex is installed in an area of 833 thousand square meters, with two runways and landings with a capacity for 29 operations per hour, and two passenger terminals, one for departure and one for disembarkation. This structure offers the capacity to serve 9.9 million passengers per year, according to Infraero.
Its name is a tribute to the Brazilian inventor Santos Dumont.