Queen Beatrix International Airport

Queen Beatrix International Airport is the sole commercial airport of Aruba and the busiest in the Dutch Caribbean, handling roughly 2.8 million passengers annually — a throughput equivalent to more than 25 times the resident population of 108,000, one of the highest passenger-to-population ratios of any airport in the Western Hemisphere. AUA sits on the southwestern coast of the island at an elevation of 60 ft (18 m), a four-minute drive from Oranjestad's cruise terminal. Its outsized role comes from Aruba's dependence on North American leisure travel; more than 60% of AUA's traffic is US-originating, and in 2016 the airport became the first in the Caribbean to offer full US Customs and Border Protection preclearance, allowing passengers to clear US immigration on Aruba and arrive on the mainland as domestic travelers. The airport is a focus city for American Airlines, United, Delta, JetBlue, and Southwest, with nonstop service to more than 20 US cities, plus KLM's daily A330 service from Amsterdam (the longest-running European route to Aruba, dating to the 1930s). KLM operates Aruba as part of a tri-point rotation with Bonaire and Curaçao, and Aruba Airlines runs regional service to Colombia, Venezuela, and Dominican Republic. A single runway, 11/29, measures 9,000 ft (2,743 m) and handles widebody operations including 787, A330, and occasional 777 equipment. The terminal was expanded and reorganized into US-preclearance and non-US-preclearance concourses, effectively giving Aruba two departure operations in one building. The airport is named for Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, who opened the current terminal in 1972.