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Johannesburg · South Africa · Africa

JNB — O.R. Tambo

O.R. Tambo International Airport serves Johannesburg, South Africa, 21 km from the city centre, and sits at 26.1°S, 28.2°E. This site carries 8 routes touching it, with the great circle distance for each.

IATA
JNB
the code on your bag tag
ICAO
FAOR
used by air traffic control
Opened
1952
per Wikidata
Passengers
21.2M
in 2017

History & name

O.R. Tambo International Airport opened in 1952 and is named after Oliver Tambo (1917–1993), the South African anti-apartheid activist and politician. Operated by Airports Company South Africa, it lies 21 km from Johannesburg at an elevation of 5,558 ft and handled 21.2 million passengers in 2017 on two runways, the longer 4,418 m.

Named afterJan Christiaan Smuts — South African statesman and military leader (1870–1950)

Read more: Wikipedia ↗ · Wikidata ↗

At a glance

Full name
O.R. Tambo International Airport
Serves
Johannesburg, South Africa
City centre
21 km from Johannesburg
Opened
1952
Operator
Airports Company South Africa
Passengers
21.2 million in 2017
Runways
2 runways, longest 4,418 m
Elevation
5,558 ft (1,694 m)

Where it sits

26.1°S, 28.2°E puts JNB in the southern hemisphere, 2,907 km from the equator and 7,101 km from the South pole.

Of the 661 airports on this site it is the 614th most northerly, which makes it the 48th most southerly.

Straight through the middle

Straight down through the centre of the Earth comes out at 26.1°N, 151.8°W. The nearest airport on this site to that point is Kahului (OGG) in United States, still 753 km away — most of the planet's antipodes are ocean.

What’s near it

The closest other airport on this site is Lanseria (HLA), 39 km away in a straight line. It is the only one within 100 km.

HLALanseria39 km

Distances from JNB

Great circle distance and an estimated time in the air. The longest is Atlanta, at 13,583 km.

ToDistanceEstimated
Cape TownCPT1,272 km2h 05m
NairobiNBO2,912 km4h 07m
MauritiusMRU3,066 km4h 19m
DubaiDXB6,413 km8h 28m
IstanbulIST7,496 km9h 49m
FrankfurtFRA8,690 km11h 18m
LondonLHR9,075 km11h 47m
AtlantaATL13,583 km17h 23m

Where these facts come from

The profile is looked up, not written from memory: type, runways, elevation and the official website from OurAirports (public domain); opening year, namesake, operator and passenger count from Wikidata (CC0); the city centre from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Where a source has nothing, the line is left out. Distances, neighbours and the antipode are computed from the coordinates.

What you won’t find: terminal maps, airline lists, shops or live departures. Orbit is a logbook, not a flight tracker, and a page that guessed at those would be worse than one that leaves them out.

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