Thousands attended the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Rarotonga International Airport yesterday morning, the festivities starting with a refreshing shower of rain that blessed the opening formalities.

Tuaine Unuia, Anautoa Rangatira, welcomed Prime Minister Mark Brown with a powerful chant. School students followed with an electrifying pe’e performance and joyous singing, filling the air with vibrant energy despite the rain.

In his welcoming address, Prime Minister Brown announced that the latest count revealed 3.2 million passengers had arrived in the country since the airport’s opening.

He said in 1974 when the airport was officially opened, arrivals reached just over 5000 people per annum, peaking at more than 170,000 in 2019.

He said while the first origins of our runway and airport stretch back to the World War II era in 1944, “today we celebrate 50 years of operation as a true international airport, with the official opening by Her Majesty in 1974 marking the beginning of what would become a new age of prosperity and development for our nation and our people”.

“Our first prime minister, Premier Albert Royle Henry, could see back then that this airport would open new doors of opportunity for the Cook Islands – it was, as Papa Arapati called it, ‘a stepping stone in our journey to economic self-sufficiency.

“Half a century later, Rarotonga Airport is the lifeline of our economy, an economy that has seen the Cook Islands graduate in 2020 to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) standard for a developed nation.”