Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) has revealed a plan to expand Tuy Hoa Airport in south-central Phu Yen province and build a new terminal so it can meet increasing travel demand.
The airport is to be capable of catering to 600,000 passengers a year by 2020 and 3 million by 2030.
Three airlines currently conduct 25 flights a week from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to and from Tuy Hoa.
Last year more than 337,000 passengers passed through the airport, an increase of more than 300 per cent against 2015 and representing 61 per cent of its capacity. The figure reached 181,500 in the first half of 2018, up 19.6 per cent against the same period of 2017.
ACV is now investing in different works, including ensuring flight safety and installing night lighting and an air traffic control tower to permit the airport to operate 24/7.
Tuy Hoa Airport was built in 1966 as one of several US Air Force air bases in then-South Vietnam. It was abandoned after the war ended and then welcomed its first commercial flights in 1996, at a frequency of two flights per week, though facilities were poor. In 2011, ACV invested in rebuilding the airport and it catered to seven to ten flights a week with a capacity of 550,000.
Ghenh Da Dia, one of the most popular sites in Phu Yen. (Photo: Tuan Nguyen Travel)
Despite boasting coastline, mountains and deltas, Phu Yen is not as popular among foreign visitors as Da Nang, Nha Trang and Mui Ne. It has become a new emerging destination for domestic travelers in recent years, however, after the local film “Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass” was screened in 2015, depicting the area’s charming beauty of massive yellow daisy fields, green fields, tranquil beaches with white smooth sand, and dozens of untouched islands.
Phu Yen is also home to many natural wonders, such as Ghenh Da Dia, which is one of only four places in the world to boast stone columns on its shoreline. Cliffs stick out into the sea like a giant black beehive, with hexagonal and circular cross-sections about 60 to 80 cm high. The rocks crowd each other in the tight space, but in other places they can resemble plates overlapping each other, which gives the area its name, as Ghenh Da Dia means “plate-shaped rock” in Vietnamese.
In its socioeconomic development master plan, Phu Yen targets becoming a new gateway to the south-central region and central highlands by 2020 and a major tourism and service center in its own right. Upgrading Tuy Hoa Airport is one of the most important investments in realizing these goals, together with other large-scale tourism, service, and infrastructure projects, according to the provincial people’s committee.