Batticaloa International Airport (, ) , formerly known as Batticaloa Airport, is an airport serving eastern Sri Lanka. It is also a military airbase known as Sri Lanka Air Force Batticaloa or SLAF Batticaloa. The airport is located in the village of Puthunagar on the island of Thimilathiu, south-west of the city of Batticaloa. It resides at an elevation of and has one runway designated 06/24 with a bitumen surface measuring . Established in 1958 as a domestic airport, the airport ceased functioning in 1979 following the collapse of Air Ceylon. The site was taken over by the Sri Lanka Air Force during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Domestic flights resumed in 2018 and in 2019 it became Sri Lanka's fifth international airport. History Domestic airport Batticaloa Airport was originally opened on 17 November 1958 and was administered by Department of Civil Aviation. About a decade later Air Ceylon started operating domestic flights between Batticaloa and Ratmalana via Gal Oya Airport using a 29-seat Nord Aviation aircraft. The 75 minute flight between Batticaloa and Ratmalana became popular, particularly with government employees who could use railway warrants for three domestic flights each year. Following the failure of Air Ceylon in August 1979 all domestic flights from the airport ceased. Sri Lankan civil war On 27 March 1983 an air force base on the site was opened M. A. Abdul Majeed, Deputy Minister of Post and Telecommunication and District Minister for Batticaloa. In 1985 around 300 families were forcibly evicted from their homes in order to expand the airport. Using emergency regulations, officials ordered residents living within a 500m radius of the runway to leave their residences. 230 homes, three temples and two schools in the villages of Puduvur and Valai Iravu were affected. Evicted residents claimed that officials had threatened to bulldoze their homes if they did not leave. The evicted families were each given 20 perches of land outside Batticaloa but the compensation for loss of their homes, which officials had promised would be paid within six months, took more than a decade to be paid and was much lower than originally promised. The airport was not expanded, nor was the runway extended, instead barbed wire fencing was erected around the airport and the area declared a "security zone". Post-civil war Following the end of the civil war, construction of a domestic airport at the base began in September 2012.