Parchi di Preturo Airport
The Heads of State and Government Leaders who, accompanied by their delegations, attended the G8 summit in L'Aquila from 8 to 19 July landed at Parchi di Preturo Airport, six kilometres from the centre of the Abruzzo regional capital.
Until the day of its inauguration on 2 July, Parchi di Preturo Airport was a simple landing strip for heliport aircraft. With the G8 Summit, it has now become a fully-fledged airport with all of the technical and security features required to allow such medium-sized aircraft as the Falcon, the C27J, the Canadair (used for fighting forest fires) and even the Atr 42, which can carry up to 40 passengers, to land there.
Over 250 aircraft landed or took off from the airport between 8 and 10 July, and 21 of the heads of state and government leaders who attended the Summit used the airport. A system of coordination between Preturo airport and the airports of Pratica di Mara, Pescara, Ciampino and Fiumicino made it possible to guarantee the punctual arrival of the delegations in Italy. The activities of planning and coordination were entrusted to a team of young experts from the Italian Army, Navy, Air Force, Coastguard and Guardia di Finanza.
Effective coordination among the various airports ensured that air traffic was efficiently handled during the G8 Summit, without impacting commercial air traffic in any way. Some 19 aircraft were used for the flights, including Air Force C27's, Navy EH 101's, Army NH20's, Guardia di Finanza Atr 42's, Army CH47's and Coastguard Atr 42's.
After the Summit ended, the local and territorial authorities set in motion the procedure required to identify the companies that will be tasked with handling air traffic and the reconstructed airport which, thanks to the expansion project, will now also be able to accommodate civil airlines.
The L'Aquila municipal authority issued a call for tender in mid-October for the provisional and experimental management of Parchi di Preturo Airport. The company that wins the contract will manage the entire airport complex (the runway and its attendant structures, as well as all of the facilities and services) for a period of not more than six months, and in any case only until the final management company is identified through a Europe-wide call for tender. The airport will be open to commercial traffic as soon as the provisional contract has been assigned.
The plan to expand the airport was spawned mainly by all of the intense activity in the area in the wake of the earthquake back in April. In the hours immediately following the earthquake, the small airport became one of the most important nerve centres for the entire rescue operation. The helicopters that transferred both the 150 patients evacuated from L'Aquila's San Salvatore Hospital and those who had been seriously injured in the earthquake, took off from Preturo. But the rescue activities, which were fortunately all completed without a hitch, did point up certain structural shortcomings in the airport: the absence of any real parking areas, runways for taxiing aircraft, holding facilities and even a control tower worthy of the name. This led to the devising of a plan to update the airport and to bring it into line with requirements.
A plan did actually exist to update both the airport itself and the road system around it even before the earthquake. The L'Aquila municipal authorities, who were planning to build a civil protection structure inside the airport, had earmarked funds for the purpose and had begun to expropriate the property in the area needed to widen the airport approach road.
But it was the decision to shift the venue for the G8 summit from La Maddalena to L'Aquila that really helped to speed up the work, in order to ensure that the heads of state and government leaders could land at Parchi di Preturo Airport. The work involved updating the airport itself, its infrastructures and the neighbouring road system. Inside the airport, the aircraft parking and hangar facility has been enlarged to 16,000 square metres, while the taxiing runway has been more than doubled in length, from 7 to 16 metres. Instrument landing system technology has been installed, a new control tower has been erected, and the take-off and landing runway has been provided with state-of-the-art lighting. At the same time, work has been carried out also on the road system linking the airport to the outside world.
The work has been funded by a contribution totalling 900,000 euro earmarked by the ENAC (Italian National Civil Aviation Board) and by the L'Aquila municipal authorities, together with a concrete contribution from the Italian Air Force Engineers and from the ENAV (Italian National Air Traffic Control Board).
As of today, in the wake of the G8 Summit, the Abruzzo region can boast an important airport in the heart of the Apennines, a vital and central hub for economic and tourist activity in the region.
