Tan Son Nhat International Airport
Facts on SGN
SGN is a fossil of the city's old name, Saigon, which the airport's code kept when the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after reunification in 1976. Saigon itself is attested as far back as a 1674 episode recorded in an 18th-century chronicle, probably a transcription of the Khmer name Prey Nokôr.
Source: Wikipedia
Tân Sơn Nhứt was a village, not a person. Under the Nguyễn emperor Tự Đức it sat in Gia Định province northwest of Saigon; the French built their airfield there around 1930, covering most of the village's land, and simply kept the village's name for it.
Source: Wikipedia (Vietnamese)
The village name has outlived almost everything around it. The village itself was swallowed by the runways, the country it served became South Vietnam and then Vietnam, and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 — but the airport is still Tân Sơn Nhất.
Source: Wikipedia
The first flight from Paris to Saigon landed at Tân Sơn Nhứt in 1933. It took eighteen days.
Source: Wikipedia (Vietnamese)
Between 1968 and 1974 Tan Son Nhut was one of the busiest military airbases in the world, and a civil airport at the same time. Pan Am schedules from 1973 show Boeing 747s to San Francisco four times a week via Guam and Manila; Continental ran up to 30 Boeing 707 military charters a week.
Source: Wikipedia
On 4 April 1975 a US Air Force C-5A Galaxy left Tan Son Nhut on the first Operation Babylift evacuation flight and crashed on approach during an emergency return. Of the 328 people aboard, 155 were killed.
Source: Wikipedia
Its two parallel runways are only 365 metres apart, too close to be used independently, so arrivals and departures have to be interleaved. That caps the airport at 44 movements an hour, lifted to 48 during peak seasons such as Tết.
Source: Wikipedia
The hop between Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi is the busiest domestic route in Southeast Asia and the fourth-busiest air route in the world, carrying around 11 million passengers in 2023 — more traffic on one city pair than many national airports see in total.
Source: Wikipedia
Terminal 3 opened in April 2025 with 27 gates and 112,500 m2 of floor space, built for VND 10,986 billion (about US$467.6 million). It lifted the airport's capacity to roughly 50 million passengers a year, up from a limit near 30 million that had left the place permanently congested.
Source: Wikipedia