Bari Airport | Karol Wojtyla Airport Guide, Italy (BRI)

Officially known as the Karol Wojtyla Airport, Bari Airport is located some 8 kilometers or approximately 5 miles northwest of the town center of Bari City.

It is situated at an elevation of 177ft/54m AMSL and its coordinates are 41°08’19.88’’N and 16°45’38.14’’E. The airport also goes by another name, Palese Airport, courtesy of the neighborhood that it is located close to.

The airport was at first a military airfield built back in the 1930s and it remained so until the 1960s when the first flight for the general public took off from its runway. The first airplane company to operate at Bari Airport was Alitalia and it provided several flights to Ancona, Rome, Palermo, Catania and Venice. Later these routes were absorbed by ATI which operated a Fokker F27 aircraft and later on a DC-9-30 although this necessitated the building of a new runway.

In 2011 the traffic volume at Palese Airport was 3,725,629 passengers.

Bari Airport has suffered one major air accident and which occurred on 6 August 2005 when a Tuninter Flight 1153 headed to Djerba, Tunisia, plunged into the Mediterranean Sea just 18 miles out of the city of Palermo killing 16 of the 39 people onboard.