The airport is an airfield, station or terminal where there is regular air traffic.
This area includes all its buildings, its facilities and its equipment. Airports are those public airfields or terminals that have services or intensity of air movement and with a series of requirements to be called an airport.
An airport is a defined area of land or water destined totally or partially to the movement or travel of air transport, and to the arrival or landing and departure or departure of aircraft.
In airports, different functions are performed in addition to the landing and take-off of aircraft, such as refueling, preventive and corrective maintenance of aircraft, and the loading and unloading of goods, passengers and luggage. They also have parking areas for aircraft that are not in service, parking areas for passenger vehicles, taxi and public transport areas, trade areas and different services, etc.
In this way, airports have two parts:
- the land-side (land side) of the airfield, where the passenger terminal, parking lots, customs, trade areas, and other services for passengers are located; and
- the air-side (air side) of the aerodrome, where the runway (takeoff and landing) is, taxiways or taxiways (auxiliary runways where airplanes wait for takeoff or are on their way to the terminal afterwards of a landing), parking areas of airplanes (airport ramps or platforms) and hangars (place where aircraft are stored, for maintenance).
The airports also have an area control center (ACC), where air traffic controllers (ATC) or control towers are located, which are those that control, direct, organize and manage all the movement of aircraft both on their own Airport as in the air zone under its jurisdiction.
There are airports of various types depending on their function or activity, for example, there are airports for military aviation, called air bases; others for civil aviation, which can be commercial (low-cost tourism), sports, cargo, general aviation.
Within airports for commercial aviation, are called international airfields or airports, those airfields with flights from abroad or abroad, and that provide customs, migration, and health services, among others; and they are called national or regional airports, those airfields with internal flights, only within a country, and therefore, lack customs service.
There are also security controls in commercial airports, such as passenger, luggage and cargo controls. These controls maintain security on the plane, performing controls on objects such as weapons and explosives, drug controls, animal controls, etc.
