Ramon International Airport

Ramon International Airport (ETM), opened in January 2019, is Israel's newest civil airport and its only full-scale alternative gateway to Ben Gurion (TLV). Located in the Timna Valley roughly 11 mi (18 km) north of Eilat on the Red Sea, the field replaced both the in-town Eilat (ETH) airstrip and the military-shared Ovda (VDA) charter base, consolidating southern Israel's commercial traffic into one modern facility. The airport is built around a single 11,811 ft (3,600 m) runway engineered to accept any widebody in service, and a terminal designed by Mann-Shinar and Moshe Zur Architects for up to 2 million passengers a year, expandable to 4.25 million. Ramon functions as the leisure gateway to the Eilat resort belt and the Arava Valley, hosting winter charter and low-cost flights from across Europe alongside year-round Israeli domestic links to Tel Aviv and Haifa; it has also served as a contingency diversion point during closures of TLV during regional conflicts, underscoring its strategic role in national aviation resilience. Named jointly for Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut lost aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, and his son Asaf Ramon, an IAF pilot, the airport combines high-security Israeli operating standards with a civilian profile aimed at growing inbound tourism. On Middle Eastern rankings ETM sits among the largest single-runway airports by infrastructure capacity, despite relatively modest route counts reflecting its specialised southern-desert catchment.