Egypt
Airport Guides

Operating Detail

Egypt airport briefings

Cairo now has two international airports, and the choice between them is the most common question we get on Egyptian trips.

Operating into Egypt

What is different about flying a private jet into Egypt

Every private and charter movement into Egypt needs a landing permit from the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority, and the desk plans on four business days. The file carries registration, airworthiness, insurance, the noise certificate, the AOC for charter, crew details and a specific stated purpose of flight rather than business, plus the fuel uplift location. Domestic legs are declared on the same filing. Cairo International is also slot coordinated with mandatory handling. Egypt runs on Eastern European Time, UTC+2, with daylight saving reinstated from 2023, and the weekend is Friday and Saturday. Winter is the season for the Nile and the Red Sea, summer for the Mediterranean coast. Northern Sinai and the Western Desert are closed; the open airports operate normally.

The first decision on a Cairo trip is the airport. Sphinx, west of the city in Giza, has a single 11,975 foot runway, 24 hour operations, customs on site, no airport slot and no mandatory handling, about 35 minutes from downtown. Most private departures now load there, with two caveats: it is a joint military field with limited crew re-access, and there is no maintenance. Cairo International has three runways, two of them 13,123 feet, but general aviation is at Hall 4 under Terminal 1, an arrival on the eastern runways means about twenty minutes and four miles of taxi, and parking beyond 24 hours means a 25 minute repositioning from the remote area. It earns its place for the east of the city, airline connections and maintenance.

The Nile and the Red Sea run on light jets and turboprops. Luxor has a 9,843 foot runway, six kilometres from the East Bank hotels; Aswan has an 11,161 foot runway about 25 kilometres from the city, and many itineraries fly into one and out of the other with the cruise between. Hurghada has a 13,123 foot main runway and a second parallel, needs PPR filed with the permit, and is twenty minutes from El Gouna, whose private 5,265 foot airstrip takes light aircraft and turboprops only and has no permanent customs. Sharm El Sheikh has a 10,108 foot main runway across the water on the Sinai. On the Mediterranean, Alexandria International sits 40 kilometres east of the city, while El Alamein sits on the resort strip itself and runs June to September.

The constraint that catches crews out is that the fuel is part of the permit. Egypt checks that the uplift location and quantity match what was filed, so a change of plan on the ramp or a top-up at a different stop stalls the trip. Uplift pricing at the Cairo tech stop moved sharply in 2026. The desk plans the fuel with the paperwork rather than after it, prices the uplift with the permit, plans servicing on arrival at Sphinx with a Cairo International alternate for technical work, and reroutes rather than cancels when Gulf airspace is restricted and Cairo becomes the corridor.

Send the dates, the aircraft and the stops four business days out, with the aircraft documents, passenger and crew passports and the fuel plan. The desk files the permit with the uplift on it, picks the Cairo field for the address, books the domestic legs on the same paperwork, files Alexandria under its current HEAX code rather than the old HEBA, and confirms clearance at El Alamein for the specific date.

Facts checked against the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority publications, the airport guides above and Icarus Jet operations data.