History
Much of the airport runway is built on a relatively recent lava flow: the 1801 Huʻehuʻe flow from Hualālai. This flow extended the shoreline out an estimated 1 mi (1.6 km), adding some 4 km2 (1.5 sq mi) of land to the island and creating Keāhole Point. The new airport was dedicated on July 1, 1970, with a single 6,500-foot (2.0 km) runway; the previous smaller airstrip was converted into the Old Kona Airport State Recreation Area.
Construction crews from Bechtel Corporation had used three million pounds of dynamite to flatten the lava flow (which was riddled with Lava tubes) within 13 months.
In its first full year, 515,378 passengers passed through the new open-air tropical-style terminals. The aquaculture ponds and solar energy experiments at the nearby Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA) can be seen during landing and take-off.
It was originally known as Ke-āhole Airport, since the ʻāhole fish (Kuhlia sandvicensis) was found nearby.
The main runway was extended in 1993 to make it the largest in the Hawaiian Islands outside of Honolulu, when it was renamed Keāhole-Kona International Airport.
In 1997 it officially became known as the Kona International Airport at Keāhole.
Japan Airlines operated a Kona-Tokyo flight from 1996 to 2010, which was Hawaii Island's only scheduled international service outside of North America. Hawaiian Airlines, however, filed an application with the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) to begin nonstop flights from Kona to Tokyo's Haneda Airport restoring the link between the two cities after Japan Airlines withdrew service to Narita Airport in 2010. The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) rejected the airline's application for the requested route despite many support from residents of west Hawaii.
Read more about this topic: Kona International Airport
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