Drafted — not technically validated
Record revision 1 · Russia's Black Sea resort airport at Adler, built as a wartime military airfield in 1941 and still shared with the Ministry of Defence.
A real-world airfield as described in public sources, and how sim maps represent it. Units, facilities and names change; each is dated where the sources allow, and the charts are not for navigation. Use current official publications for flight planning.
Location and identity
- Location
- Adler District of Sochi, Krasnodar Krai, on the Black Sea coast [1]
- Country or territory
- Russia
- Coordinates
- 43.4499° N, 39.9566° E [3]
- Identifiers
- ICAO URSS · IATA AER
- Other names
- Opened
- built in 50 days from 9 July 1941 as a military airfield to defend the Black Sea coast; it took its first combat aircraft on 1 September 1941 [2]
- Theatre
- The Caucasus
Role and operators
- Status
- Active · Joint military and civil
- Roles today
- Civil airport
Units
Permanently based units belong to the airfield; rotational and temporarily deployed units are there for a period or an operation. Dates are when the sources place each unit there; "as of" is when a source described it as current.
Earlier
Regiments of the Soviet 5th Air Army and other Transcaucasian Front air units [2]
- Service
- Soviet Union (until 1991), air force
- Basing
- Not stated in the sources
- When
- from 1942, end not given
Special (Black Sea) Transport Detachment of the Black Sea Fleet Air Force [2]
- Service
- Soviet Union (until 1991), navy
- Basing
- Not stated in the sources
- When
- from 1941, end not given
Runways and facilities
The sources do not date these figures. Facilities not listed here are not documented in the sources cited, which does not mean the airfield lacks them.
| Runway | Length | Width | Surface |
|---|---|---|---|
| 06/24 [1] [3]3,000 m as published | 9,498 ft (2,895 m) | 148 ft (45 m) | concrete |
| 02/20 [1] [3]extended to 2.6 km by 2024, as satellite imagery shows | 8,202 ft (2,500 m) | 161 ft (49 m) | concrete |
- Arresting gear
- None documented in the sources cited
- Navaids
- None documented in the sources cited
Figure 1 — Airfield map of Sochi International Airport (to scale)
- Runway
- Taxiway, with its name
- Apron
- Hangar or terminal
- Helipad
- Airfield boundary
Runways, taxiways, aprons and buildings inside the airfield boundary, true north up, drawn from OpenStreetMap data retrieved 2026-10-28. Widths come from the map data or, where it gives none, a typical 45 m runway and 18 m taxiway. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the ODbL 1.0. Community-mapped, not an official aerodrome chart, and not for navigation.
Sim maps
Represented in: DCS: Caucasus
DCS: Caucasus DCS World · Present day
Represented as “Sochi-Adler” · checked 2026-10-28 [4]
- Runway 06/24 [4]
- Tower 127.0 MHz VHF and 256.0 MHz UHF [4]
- An NDB with marker (CO) and an ILS on runway 06, 111.1 MHz (ISO) [4]
Differences from the real airfield
Only the maps marked represented or confirmed absent have been checked. Any other map may or may not represent this airfield.
Role today
Sochi is one of Russia’s ten largest airports and was the main gateway for the 2014 Winter Olympics. [1] It is a civil airport shared with the Ministry of Defence, the FSB and the Emergencies Ministry. [2] Because mountains rise to the north and north-east, aircraft land only from the sea and take off back towards it. [1] [2]
History
The airfield was built for the Second World War: from 9 July 1941 the people of Sochi cleared a grass landing ground in 50 days, and it took its first combat aircraft on 1 September. [2] The Black Sea Fleet air force’s transport detachment flew from it, and from 1942 regiments of the 5th Air Army and other Transcaucasian Front units were based there. [2]
It became Adler civil airport on 23 November 1945, replacing Sochi’s old airfield in the river valley; the first runway and terminal followed in 1956, and it was renamed Sochi in 1967. [1] [2]
On 25 December 2016 a Russian military Tu-154 bound for Latakia in Syria, with members of the Alexandrov Ensemble military choir aboard, crashed into the Black Sea two minutes after taking off from Sochi; all 92 people on board were killed. [1]
The airfield
Two paved runways, 06/24 and 02/20. [1] [3] The authority planned to extend 06/24 to 3.5 km, part of it over the Mzymta River. [1]
Sources
- Sochi International Airport. Wikipedia (secondary source). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sochi_International_Airport (accessed 2026-10-28).
- Сочи (аэропорт) (Sochi airport). Russian Wikipedia (secondary source, in Russian). https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Сочи_(аэропорт) (accessed 2026-10-28). Infobox (joint use with the Ministry of Defence, FSB and Emergencies Ministry) and the history of the wartime military airfield.
- Airport and runway data, URSS. OurAirports open data (public domain, community-maintained). https://davidmegginson.github.io/ourairports-data/airports.csv (accessed 2026-10-28). Rows for URSS in airports.csv and runways.csv: position, elevation and both runways.
- dcs-world-schema reference data: Caucasus airbases (Sochi-Adler.json). dcs-world-schema, open-source data extracted by running DCS World 2.9.30.28536. https://github.com/YoloWingPixie/dcs-world-schema/blob/c3091e6c08fb8167e26145d0e33c10e4140c6fe7/dcs-world-reference/latest/airbases/Caucasus/Sochi-Adler.json (accessed 2026-10-28). With its beacon and navaid files, as tabled on the DCS: Caucasus map page.
Wikipedia articles are secondary sources and can change; they are cited with the date they were read. FAA airport data and diagrams are official but are reissued every 28 or 56 days; each is cited with the edition read. pydcs mirrors the DCS terrain data at the commit linked.