Major Airports in Myanmar

Myanmar (Burma) runs a hub-and-spoke aviation network centred on its largest city, shaped by geography, a long civil conflict and the upheaval that followed the February 2021 military coup. Its busiest airport sits in Yangon, the commercial capital and main gateway to the world, followed at a distance by Mandalay, the cultural centre of central Myanmar and the country’s second international gateway. Behind them sits a web of small regional and border airfields, several of which have seen service suspended or cut as fighting has spread. The purpose-built national capital, Naypyidaw, has a large airport but very little traffic.

Below we map and rank Myanmar’s airports by the number of nonstop destinations each one serves, drawn from live route data on AirportRoutes. We rank by regularly-served destinations, routes flown often enough to count as scheduled service, rather than raw nonstop totals, which can overstate one-off and seasonal flying. The figures come from observed flight data (a sample rather than a complete published timetable), so treat them as a guide to relative connectivity, not official totals.

Can you fly nonstop from Myanmar to the US?

No. Myanmar has no scheduled nonstop flights to the United States, and none of its airports has ever sustained a direct route across the Pacific or the Atlantic. The country’s airlines are regional and short to medium-haul, and since the 2021 military coup Myanmar’s international connectivity has shrunk rather than grown, with Western sanctions and the suspension of many foreign carriers cutting it further off from long-haul markets.

Travellers heading to the US connect through a regional hub. The most common routings run through Bangkok, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, all a short flight from Yangon and offering wide North American coverage, or through a Gulf gateway such as Doha on Qatar Airways, which still serves Yangon directly. From there it is a single onward flight to the US. A nonstop Myanmar to US route has never had the demand, or the political conditions, to take hold.

A closer look at Myanmar’s airports

✈️ Yangon International Airport (RGN)

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Yangon International serves Myanmar’s largest city and former capital, and is by far the busiest airport in the country and its main gateway to the world. It sits north of the city centre and handles almost all of Myanmar’s international traffic. A modern terminal expansion completed in 2016 lifted its capacity, but passenger numbers have fallen since the 2021 military coup as foreign airlines trimmed or suspended service and Western sanctions and travel advisories weighed on demand.

RGN reaches around 38 regularly-served nonstop destinations. Most are regional: Bangkok (both of its airports), Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Chiang Mai dominate, alongside Chinese cities and a thin set of longer links toward the Gulf. It also anchors the domestic network, with flights to Mandalay, Heho for Inle Lake, Myeik and beyond. International carriers serving Yangon include Thai AirAsia, Bangkok Airways, Thai Airways, Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways and China Eastern, though schedules remain volatile.

Main airlines: Myanmar Airways International, Myanmar National Airlines, Mann Yadanarpon Airlines, Air Thanlwin, Thai AirAsia. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

🛕 Mandalay International Airport (MDL)

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Mandalay International serves the cultural heart of central Myanmar, the country’s second-largest city and its last royal capital. The airport opened in 2000, well outside the city, and is Myanmar’s second international gateway. Its location makes it the natural hub for the central dry zone, the historic sites around Mandalay and the temple plain of Bagan to the south.

MDL reaches around 16 regularly-served destinations. Unlike Yangon, much of its international flying points north into China, with links to Kunming and Mangshi that reflect close trade ties across the border, plus Bangkok in Thailand. The rest is domestic, connecting Yangon, the Kachin capital Myitkyina, the Shan towns and Bagan.

Main airlines: Myanmar Airways International, Myanmar National Airlines, Air Thanlwin, Mann Yadanarpon Airlines, Ruili Airlines, China Eastern. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

🏛️ Nay Pyi Taw International Airport (NYT)

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Nay Pyi Taw International serves Myanmar’s purpose-built capital, a city the military government carved out of scrubland in central Myanmar and made the seat of power in 2006. The airport is large and modern, built to befit a capital, but the city itself is famously underpopulated, with wide empty boulevards and little of the bustle of Yangon or Mandalay.

That mismatch shows in the numbers. Despite being the capital’s airport, NYT runs only around 2 regularly-served routes, short domestic hops to Yangon and a handful of other cities, far fewer than its size suggests. It works largely as a government and backup airport rather than a busy commercial hub, which is why it ranks below much smaller border airfields on connectivity.

Main airlines: Myanmar National Airlines, Myanmar Airways International. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

🛂 Tachileik Airport (THL)

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Tachileik Airport sits in the far east of Shan State, on the border with Thailand directly opposite the Thai town of Mae Sai. This is the edge of the Golden Triangle, the historically lawless region where Myanmar, Thailand and Laos meet, long associated with cross-border trade.

THL handles around 3 regularly-served routes, all domestic, linking Tachileik to Heho, Yangon, Mandalay and Lashio. It is one of the busier of Myanmar’s small regional airports, serving an isolated corner of the country that is far easier to reach by air than over the mountain roads of eastern Shan State.

Main airlines: Mann Yadanarpon Airlines, Myanmar National Airlines, Air Thanlwin. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

⛰️ Kengtung Airport (KET)

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Kengtung Airport serves a historic town in the hills of eastern Shan State, set among the Tai, Akha and Wa communities of the uplands. Long isolated from the rest of the country by distance and terrain, Kengtung has historically had closer cultural ties to northern Thailand and southern China than to lowland Myanmar.

KET reaches around 3 regularly-served destinations, all domestic, connecting Kengtung to Heho, Yangon and Mandalay. Like Tachileik, it leans on air links because the roads through eastern Shan State are long, slow and, in recent years, frequently cut by conflict.

Main airlines: Myanmar Airways International, Mann Yadanarpon Airlines. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

💎 Myitkyina Airport (MYT)

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Myitkyina Airport serves the capital of Kachin State in Myanmar’s far north, a city on the Irrawaddy River near the confluence that forms it. The surrounding region is the centre of Myanmar’s jade industry, the source of some of the world’s finest jadeite, and has seen decades of conflict between the army and Kachin forces.

MYT runs around 2 regularly-served routes, domestic links to Mandalay, Yangon and the small northern outpost of Putao. Air travel matters here: the overland journey south is long and frequently disrupted, so flights are often the practical way in and out of the far north.

Main airlines: Air Thanlwin, Mann Yadanarpon Airlines, Myanmar Airways International. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

⚓ Dawei Airport (TVY)

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Dawei Airport serves the capital of Tanintharyi Region in Myanmar’s long southern panhandle, the strip of land that runs down beside Thailand toward the Malay Peninsula. Dawei is best known for an ambitious, long-stalled Thai-backed deep-sea port and special economic zone, intended to open a new trade route between the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand.

TVY handles around 2 regularly-served domestic routes, linking Dawei to Yangon and the southern towns of Myeik and Kawthoung along the Tanintharyi coast. With the southern road network thin and the region strung out along the coast, these short flights tie the panhandle to the rest of the country.

Main airlines: Myanmar Airways International, Mann Yadanarpon Airlines, Air Thanlwin, Myanmar National Airlines. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

🛢️ Kyaukpyu Airport (KYP)

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Kyaukpyu Airport sits on the Rakhine coast south of Sittwe and serves a small town with outsized strategic importance. Kyaukpyu is the Myanmar terminus of the China to Myanmar oil and gas pipelines that run northeast to Kunming, and the planned site of a Chinese-backed deep-sea port and special economic zone, a key part of Beijing’s bid for an Indian Ocean outlet that bypasses the Strait of Malacca.

Despite that strategic weight, the airport itself is small, with around 2 regularly-served routes, domestic flights to Yangon and Sittwe. Its importance is geopolitical and economic rather than aviation: the pipelines and the port, not the runway, are what put Kyaukpyu on the map.

Main airlines: Myanmar National Airlines, Myanmar Airways International, Mann Yadanarpon Airlines. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

🌊 Sittwe Airport (AKY)

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Sittwe Airport serves the capital of Rakhine State on the Bay of Bengal coast in western Myanmar. The city sits at the mouth of the Kaladan River and is the planned coastal terminus of India’s Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit project, a long-running effort to link India’s northeast to the sea through Myanmar.

AKY shows just 1 regularly-served route in the data, a reflection of how badly fighting in Rakhine State has disrupted normal life and air service. Flights have been intermittent as the conflict between the military and the Arakan Army has intensified across the state, at times cutting Sittwe off by road and leaving the airport a fragile lifeline.

Main airlines: Mann Yadanarpon Airlines. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

🏔️ Putao Airport (PBU)

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Putao Airport is the northernmost airport in Myanmar, set in a remote valley in the far north of Kachin State, in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. The town is the staging point for expeditions toward Hkakabo Razi, at around 5,880 metres the highest mountain in Southeast Asia, and for some of the most isolated country in the region.

PBU runs a single regularly-served route, a domestic flight that connects it to Myitkyina and onward to the rest of the country. For much of the year the overland route is impassable, so the airport is the only practical link between Putao and the outside world.

Main airlines: Myanmar Airways International. See the full route map on AirportRoutes →

Myanmar’s other airports

Beyond the ten airports above, Myanmar has a scatter of smaller fields, most running a single domestic route or sitting idle as conflict and the collapse in tourism since 2021 have thinned the network.

In the far south, Myeik (MGZ), the old port of Mergui, is the gateway to the Mergui Archipelago, a chain of hundreds of largely uninhabited islands prized for diving; it keeps a thin link to Yangon. Kawthoung (KAW), at the very southern tip of the country opposite the Thai town of Ranong, holds Myanmar’s southernmost airfield. To the north, Lashio (LSH) in northern Shan State shows no regularly-served flights in the current data: the town was captured by an ethnic armed group, the MNDAA, in 2024, and its airport has been caught up in the fighting. On the Rakhine coast, Thandwe (SNW) is the airport for Ngapali, Myanmar’s premier beach resort, whose seasonal tourist traffic has all but vanished.

Two well-known tourist airfields sit just outside this ranked list. Heho (HEH), the gateway to Inle Lake and the hill town of Kalaw, and Nyaung U (NYU), the airport for the temple plain of Bagan, were once among the busiest domestic stops in the country. Both have seen traffic fall sharply since 2021, a measure of how far Myanmar’s once-growing tourism industry has dropped.

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