Five days before marking six months as the third airport of the Buenos Aires metropolis, El Palomar has started work on a new terminal. With an area of 302 square metres, this building will have two more gates to permit more flights. For now only one airline operates there – Flybondi.Meanwhile the Transport Ministry is preparing more works to convert the former Air Force base into an international terminal (especially for regional flights), announcing that as from November there will be connections with Chile, a route already requested by two airlines.
The current terminal was inaugurated on February 9 with Flybondi’s maiden flight to Córdoba (which was forced into an Ezeiza stopover by bad weather). According to the Transport Ministry, the new "satellite terminal" will have an embarkment hall complementary to the current, permitting two additional gates (3 and 4), more restrooms and a catering sector.
This extensión is different to that announced last year, which consisted of three stages and now remains pending. The first was the current provisional terminal, the second a project to remodel the hangars and thirdly a future terminal costing a billion pesos.

The small terminal inaugurated in February and used by Flybondi is administered by Aeropuertos Argentina 2000.
In the first few weeks the airline was complicated by having only one aeroplane along with the detours to Aeroparque in bad weather.

But now it has five aircraft and flies 12 destinations out of El Palomar. On July 1 it added another route from the new airport to Iguazú. According to the airline, it has transported over 240,000 passengers, of whom "20% were flying for the first time in their lives.”

Apart from the new destination, the same week brought the low-cost airline the news they were waiting to hear – the elimination of price floors for flights enabling them to offer cheaper tickets, something they have been requesting since they started flying out of El Palomar.
But according to the government, Flybondi will not be alone in El Palomar much longer. The Chilean airlines JetSmart and Sky could start flying inland and to Santiago.

"JetSmart has asked us for a series of routes operating from Santiago (Chile) to various inland cities, including El Palomar, as from November," commented Tomás Insausti, head of the ANAC (Administración Nacional de Aviación Civil) civil aviation authority to Télam. Flybondi also anticipated that it will be flying to Montevideo, Punta del Este and Asunción.
Meanwhile the works on the "satellite terminal" at a cost of seven million pesos and tendered to AA2000 continue to advance. Another expansion of the current terminal for 40 million pesos is projected, an obligatory step towards converting El Palomar into an international airport.
Other steps include doubling the capacity of the airport police (PSA), making room for another control scanner and a new sector for Customs and Immigration, necessary prerequisites for entering and leaving the country. Furthermore, the project contemplates three new check-in counters for a total of eight in a building of 815 square metres.

After the works started, Morón Mayor Ramiro Tagliaferro highlighted: “El Palomar Airport is related to what we want – progress and putting Morón back in the páges of history along with the aviation revolution". 

IN NUMBERS

Four embarkment gates when the works are finished, doubling the current two.

At 100 metres of the current terminal a building of 302 square metres will be constructed for the other  two gates with an investment of seven million pesos.