Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz International Airport

Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz International Airport (IATA: ELQ, ICAO: OEGS) is an international airport in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is located to the west of Buraydah City, the administrative capital of Qassim Province. The airport was built in 1971 and is the only airport serving the province.

Prince Nayef Bin Abdulaziz International Airport is managed by the General Authority of Civil Aviation. It can be accessed from inside Buraydah City via King Abdulaziz Road or King Fahd Road. It occupies an area of 0.0055 km and has a capacity of 550,000 passengers per year.

In 2012, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud ordered the renaming of Qassim Airport as Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz Airport. The airport was one of the Kingdom's regional airports, before being upgraded to an international airport in 2017. Currently, about thirteen airlines operate at the airport, offering international and domestic flights. This aims to activate the Kingdom's domestic airports and facilitate travel between different regions.

Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz International Airport services gradually escalated until it began operating international and domestic flights in 2017. The number of flights at the airport in 2010 was 4,885 with 409,000 passengers. This increased to 5,948 flights with 595,171 passengers in 2011, then reached approximately 7,347 flights with 771,878 passengers in 2012. The figures rose in 2013 to 9,185 flights with 1,147,886 passengers, and in 2014 they reached 10,174 flights with 1,150,000 passengers. In 2015, the number of flights increased to 12,216 with 1,443,210 passengers, and rose in 2016 to 15,552 flights with 1,718,856 passengers. In 2019, 15,151 international and domestic flights carrying 1,653,000 passengers landed and took off from Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz International Airport.

In 2023, construction works began to build the new additional lounge project at Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz International Airport to accommodate more than seven hundred thousand passengers per year on an area of seventy thousand m. The new lounge’s area is 7,400 m, and includes check-in zones with eleven counters, four self-service devices, two baggage conveyors, three security inspection devices, four internal departure gates, and an internal arrivals gate.

International and domestic air traffic at the airport has increased to approximately 1.1 million passengers in 2022. The additional lounge planned at Prince Naif Bin Abdulaziz Airport will further increase capacity by more than 150 percent compared to its previous capacity.

In view of the outstanding performance of Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz International Airport, the Airport obtained the first position in the performance report of international and domestic airports for January 2023. It achieved this ranking in the fourth category for international airports with an annual passenger traffic of less than two million passengers, at a 100 percent commitment rate. It outperformed its competitors in the average total waiting times for departing and arriving flights.