Drafted — not technically validated
Record revision 1 · Abkhazia's main airport, closed by war in 1993 and reopened to Moscow flights in 2025; base of the small Abkhaz air force.
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
- At Babushara, 18 km south-east of Sukhumi in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, on the shore of Sukhumi Bay [2]
- Country or territory
- Georgia
- Coordinates
- 42.8582° N, 41.1281° E [3]
- Elevation
- 53 ft (16 m) [3]
- Identifiers
- UGSS · URAS
- Other names
- Theatre
- The Caucasus
Role and operators
- Status
- Active · Joint military and civil
- Roles today
- Civil airport
- Operators
- Vladislav Ardzinba Sukhum International Airport (Abkhaz state enterprise), joint civil and state-aviation airfield since 2019 · Abkhazia (breakaway region of Georgia), civil · as of Oct 2026 [2]
- Abkhaz air force, five L-39s and six helicopters, as the source gives them · Abkhazia (breakaway region of Georgia), air force · as of Oct 2026 [2]
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12/30 [1] [3]3,145 m as published in source 1; source 3 lists 12,012 ft | 10,318 ft (3,145 m) | 172 ft (52 m) | concrete |
- Arresting gear
- None documented in the sources cited
- Navaids
- None documented in the sources cited
Figure 1 — Airfield map of Sukhum International Airport (Babushara) (to scale)
- Runway
- Taxiway
- Apron
- Hangar or terminal
- 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 “Sukhumi-Babushara” · checked 2026-10-28 [4]
Only the maps marked represented or confirmed absent have been checked. Any other map may or may not represent this airfield.
Role today
Sukhum is the main airport of Abkhazia, which Georgia and most of the world regard as part of Georgia. [1] After more than thirty years without regular passenger flights it reopened on 1 May 2025 with flights to Moscow, following a Russian-funded rebuilding; ICAO does not recognise it as an international airport and withdrew its code in 2006. [1] [2] Since 2019 it has been a joint civil and state-aviation airfield, and the Abkhaz air force, five L-39s and six helicopters, is based there. [2]
History
The airport and its terminal were built in the mid-1960s for holiday traffic to the Abkhaz coast; the concrete was thickened in the late 1970s for Il-76s, and the runway was lengthened in the mid-1980s for Il-86s. [1] [2] On 14 August 1982 a Tu-134A and an L-410 collided on the runway, killing all 11 aboard the L-410. [1]
The airport was heavily damaged in the war of the early 1990s and closed in 1993; mines left on it, even on the runway, were later cleared by the HALO Trust. [1] [2] During the 2008 war, on 11 August, Russian Il-76 transports landed there with paratroopers and equipment, the first military transports in 15 years, according to airport workers’ accounts. [2]
The airfield
A single concrete runway, 12/30, on the coastal lowland by Sukhumi Bay, which allows approaches from both directions. [2] Published lengths differ: 3,145 m in one source and 12,012 ft in another. [1] [3]
Sources
- Sukhum International Airport. Wikipedia (secondary source). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhum_International_Airport (accessed 2026-10-28).
- Сухум (аэропорт) (Sukhum airport). Russian Wikipedia (secondary source, in Russian). https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Сухум_(аэропорт) (accessed 2026-10-28). Description, Soviet history, the 1993 closure, the August 2008 airlift and the Abkhaz air force. Some details there rest on airport workers' accounts and are hedged here.
- Airport and runway data, UGSS. OurAirports open data (public domain, community-maintained). https://davidmegginson.github.io/ourairports-data/airports.csv (accessed 2026-10-28). Rows for UGSS in airports.csv and runways.csv.
- dcs-world-schema reference data: Caucasus airbases (Sukhumi-Babushara.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/Sukhumi-Babushara.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.