Drafted — not technically validated
Record revision 1 · Georgia's busiest airport, opened in 1952 and run by TAV since 2005.
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
- South-east of Tbilisi, Georgia's capital [1]
- Country or territory
- Georgia
- Coordinates
- 41.6692° N, 44.9547° E [3]
- Identifiers
- ICAO UGTB · IATA TBS
- Other names
- Shota Rustaveli Tbilisi International Airport (since 2015) [1]
- Opened
- 1952; that year's terminal is now the VIP lounge [1]
- Theatre
- The Caucasus
Role and operators
- Status
- Active · Civil
- Roles today
- Civil airport
- Operators
- TAV Urban Georgia, concession holder since October 2005, part of TAV Airports Holding and Groupe ADP · Turkey, civil · since Oct 2005 [1]
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13R/31L [1] [3]3,000 m | 9,843 ft (3,000 m) | 147 ft (45 m) | concrete |
| 13L/31R [1] [3]2,500 m, closed | 8,202 ft (2,500 m) | 196 ft (60 m) | asphalt |
- Arresting gear
- None documented in the sources cited
- Navaids
- None documented in the sources cited
Figure 1 — Airfield map of Tbilisi 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 “Tbilisi-Lochini” · 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
Tbilisi is Georgia’s busiest airport, with 4.75 million passengers in 2024, and the hub of Georgian Airways. [1] It has been run since October 2005 by TAV Urban Georgia, majority-owned by TAV Airports Holding. [1] The sources consulted describe no based military flying unit.
History
The airport opened in 1952; a second terminal followed in 1968, and in 1981 it was the Soviet Union’s twelfth-busiest airport, with 1,478,000 passengers on domestic Soviet routes. [1] After independence, civil war and economic crisis cut that to 230,000 by 1998. [1]
On 20 July 1992 an overloaded Tu-154 freighter carrying about 20 tonnes of tea overran the runway on take-off, killing all 24 aboard and 4 people on the ground. [1] A $90.5 million rebuilding finished in February 2007 with a new international terminal and work on the apron, taxiways and runway; a rail link to the city was built but never brought into service. [1] [2] The main runway was renovated in 2016, with new lighting and an upgraded instrument landing system. [1]
The airfield
Two parallel runways: 13R/31L, 3,000 m of concrete, in use, and 13L/31R, 2,500 m of asphalt, closed; TAV agreed with United Airports of Georgia to rebuild the closed runway to take the largest aircraft. [1] [3]
Sources
- Tbilisi International Airport. Wikipedia (secondary source). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tbilisi_International_Airport (accessed 2026-10-28).
- Тбилиси (аэропорт) (Tbilisi airport). Russian Wikipedia (secondary source, in Russian). https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Тбилиси_(аэропорт) (accessed 2026-10-28). The 2007 rebuilding and the unused rail link.
- Airport and runway data, UGTB. OurAirports open data (public domain, community-maintained). https://davidmegginson.github.io/ourairports-data/airports.csv (accessed 2026-10-28). Rows for UGTB in airports.csv and runways.csv: position, elevation and both runways.
- dcs-world-schema reference data: Caucasus airbases (Tbilisi-Lochini.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/Tbilisi-Lochini.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.