Napakanti Airport

While no official reason is documented, the closure was likely due to a combination of factors common for small, remote airstrips. These include: 1) **Lack of Maintenance:** The difficulty and cost of maintaining a usable runway in a tropical climate without consistent funding. 2) **Land Reclamation:** The adjacent village of Napakanti has expanded, and the land formerly used for the airstrip has been repurposed for housing, agriculture, and footpaths. 3) **Consolidation of Services:** Air services in the Guna Yala region may have been consolidated to other nearby, better-maintained airstrips, making this one redundant.

The airport is permanently closed and defunct. The site of the former runway is now completely overgrown and has been absorbed by the village of Napakanti. Satellite imagery clearly shows houses, small structures, and footpaths crisscrossing the area where the airstrip once lay. The faint outline of the runway is still visible from the air, but it is entirely unusable for any form of aviation.

Napakanti Airport was a small, unpaved dirt/grass airstrip that served the remote indigenous Guna community of Napakanti on the Caribbean coast of Panama. It never held an official IATA code and the ICAO code 'PA-0031' is a non-standard, unofficial identifier (Panama's official ICAO country prefix is 'MP'). The airport's primary function was to provide a critical lifeline to an isolated area, facilitating medical evacuations, the delivery of essential supplies like food and medicine, and the transport of personnel such as missionaries, doctors, and government officials. Operations were typically conducted by small STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) aircraft operated by charter companies or missionary aviation groups.

There are no known plans or prospects for reopening Napakanti Airport. Given that the land has been reclaimed by the local community for housing and other purposes, reopening the airstrip would be logistically difficult and expensive. It would require displacing residents, clearing significant vegetation, and completely rebuilding the runway surface. There is no apparent economic or social driver for such a project at this time.