Getting to the Rene Mouawad military airport in North Lebanon’s Qlayaat requires a bumpy, half-hour long drive from Tripoli over unpaved country roads, farmland and orchards.  Mahmoud Hussein, 50, one of the landowners in the village, built his house right next to the airport, and his orange orchards are spread out along the fence. As a concerned neighbor, he has studied in detail the possibility of having the almost deserted military airbase turned into a civil airport. “The project is older,” he told NOW. “They have been discussing it for years. We hope they will actually put it into practice this time.”

 

The Lebanese cabinet recently approved a proposal to study the requirements to reactivate the Rene Mouawad Airport. The Ministry of Transportation and Public Works has been tasked with carrying out the study, and Minister Ghazi Aridi himself visited the airport in September. “He conducted a technical feasibility study for the runway and for expanding it,” Qlayaat’s head of municipality, Ahmad Ibrahim, told NOW. “This is very good news for us. It would create jobs in the region and it would be a serious boost for the economy here.” [Link]