From 5 November to 5 December, the Catania airport, Fontanarossa, will be closed, and a reduced number of flights will operate from the US military airport of Sigonella.

This is being done so as to completely renovate the Fontanarossa runway, the first renovation in its 50 years of continuous activity.

This change will undoubtedly impact on Maltese passengers visiting Catania.

They will now have to be at the Fontanarossa airport three hours before their flight, since check-in procedures will still be at Fontanarossa. They will then board a bus that takes them and their luggage to Sigonella. Passengers have been warned that they are not to try and reach Sigonella on their own. Cameras may not be used on the military base.

Given the restrictions of operating out of a military airport, flights have been restricted to four flights an hour, 72 per day. 30 of these will be going to Rome’s Fiumicino airport and 16 to Milan’s Linate.

The Fontanarossa authorities defended their choice of Sigonella since, they said, the nearest civilian airports were those of Palermo, 200 kms away, and Reggio Calabria, which would mean that passengers would have been expected to cross the Straits of Messina, to use either of them. However, they said nothing about the non-use of Comiso, where a civilian airport lies practically unused, even though this is further away than Sigonella.

An alternative could also have been to create a second runway at Fontanarossa. At present, the Catania airport is the sixth one in Italy with 7 million passengers a year.

The international flights to Malta have been so announced: Monday (Arrival: 14:25; Departure: 15:40), Wednesday (Arrival: 15:55; Departure: 17:10), Friday (Arrival: 17:30; Departure: 18:45) and two flights on Saturday (Arrival: 8:00; Departure: 9:15 and Arrival: 18:25; Departure: 19:40).