Santa Maria Airport is an airport on Santa Maria Island

Santa Maria Island

Santa Maria , Portuguese for Saint Mary, is an island located in the eastern group of the Azores archipelago and the southernmost island in the Azores...

, in the autonomous region of the Azores

Azores

The Archipelago of the Azores is composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is located about west from Lisbon and about east from the east coast of North America. The islands, and their economic exclusion zone, form the Autonomous Region of the...

, Portugal

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

, serving the municipality of Vila do Porto

Vila do Porto

Vila do Porto is the single municipality, the name of the main town and one of the civil parishes on the island of Santa Maria, in the Portuguese Autonomous Region of Azores...

, within the archipelago and to the continent. It has three runways, with the longest being 10,000 feet (3,048 meters).

It was built in the context of the Second World War, by US troops in order to maintain supply lines to Europe, and inaugurated on July 26, 1945. A year later, on June 2, 1946, American forces transferred title/control to the Portuguese State. The forerunner of SATA Air Açores (Sociedade Açoriana de Transportes Aéreos) initiated services concurrently to São Miguel and Terceira from Santa Maria Airport on August 5, 1947, using a plane christened "Açor".

Transportes Aéreos Portugueses (TAP) began lay-over flights to this airport on December 7, 1962, and eventually inaugurating trans-atlantic service between Santa Maria-New York (April 26, 1969) and Santa Maria-Montreal (May 8, 1971).

For a while, Air France

Air France

Air France , stylised as AIRFRANCE, is the French flag carrier headquartered in Tremblay-en-France, , and is one of the world's largest airlines. It is a subsidiary of the Air France-KLM Group and a founding member of the SkyTeam global airline alliance...

's supersonic Concorde

Concorde

Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde was a turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner, a supersonic transport . It was a product of an Anglo-French government treaty, combining the manufacturing efforts of Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation...

s were routed to Santa Maria on refueling layovers between Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 and Caracas

Caracas

Caracas , officially Santiago de León de Caracas, is the capital and largest city of Venezuela; natives or residents are known as Caraquenians in English . It is located in the northern part of the country, following the contours of the narrow Caracas Valley on the Venezuelan coastal mountain range...

.

Airlines and destinations

Incidents

A chartered Boeing 707-300, Independent Air Flight 1851

Independent Air Flight 1851

In 1989, Independent Air Flight 1851, a Boeing 707-331B on an American charter flight from Bergamo, Italy to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, struck Pico Alto on approach to Santa Maria Airport in the Azores for a scheduled stopover...

from Bergamo, Italy in 1989 crashed on approach to Santa Maria Airport, when it struck the Pico Alto mountain. The aircraft was destroyed with the loss of all passengers and crew. The accident was the result of bad communication and failure to follow standard procedures by crew and air traffic control.